Fay Weldon Biography

Fay Weldon's concern began as personal relationships in contemporary society, focusing on women, especially as mothers, and thus widening to take in relationships between the generations: "By our children, you shall know us." She amusingly traces long chains of cause and effect, inexorable as Greek tragedy, stemming from both conscious and unconscious motivation, and from chance circumstances. She looks at society with devastating clearsightedness, showing how good may spring from selfishness, evil from altruism.

Weldon's unique narrative style highlights the contradiction between free will which her characters, like us, assume and the conditioning which we know we undergo. Her characters are continually referred to by their names, where English style would normally use a pronoun, and addressed directly in the second person by the author and assessed by her—"Lucky Lily" the author appraises a leading character in Remember Me, where she also "translates" passages of the characters' dialogue into what they mean, rather than say. In The Hearts and Lives of Men the author continually buttonholes "Reader." Weldon's apparently disingenuous surface, with her own paragraphing lay-out, is underpinned by a whole battery of ironic devices, indicating the limitations on her characters'—and our—autonomy from cradle to grave. In Puffball this process is pushed back before the cradle, with sections "Inside Liffey" about the growth of the fetus and its conditioning via the circumstances of the mother's life.

The Fat Woman's Joke, Weldon's first novel, follows a greedy couple on a diet: this novel originated as a television play, and Weldon hadn't fully developed her unique style. Her characteristic plangent note, that the worst can happen and does, is accompanied by a muted optimism, especially in her novels' endings: gradual progress occurs, at least for the majority if not for the unfortunate individual. Down among the Women concludes "We are the last of the women"—that is, the half of the population defined earlier as living "at floor level, washing and wiping."

Weldon's feminism colors all her work, and is powerful when she doesn't shrink from detailing the faults of individual women, or the way women exploit what advantages the system yields them. Men are the exploiting sex because the system favors them, and they take for granted the status quo. In Female Friends, focusing on three women friends and their mothers, Grace is shown as worthless, until perhaps the end, while Oliver and Patrick take what the system offers—and more.

The machinery of plot in Remember Me is ostensibly supernatural, as a dead divorced wife haunts her ex-husband's second ménage. Weldon's apparent reliance on the supernatural may seem unsatisfactory both here and in Puffball, where pregnant Liffey is "over-looked" by the local witch. But in both novels the psychology suggests something of Marjorie's realization about her "haunted" home in Female Friends: "it was me haunting myself, sending myself messages."

In Little Sisters (Words of Advice in the U.S.) Weldon turned to the very rich. This black comedy centers melodramatically on the wheelchair-bound Gemma, narrator of the story within a story. Weldon also uses this device in The Fat Woman's Joke, Praxis, The President's Child, and Darcy's Utopia. The story-within-a-story device enables her to run different time-sequences simultaneously, emphasizing the interlocking of cause and effect between the generations, and also to highlight our imperfect understanding and information, through each individual's partial perception.

Praxis charts the life of a woman who served a prison sentence for killing "a poor little half-witted" baby, as we learn from one of the first-person chapters alternating at the start of the novel with the third-person chapters that subsequently take over. Puffball, about Liffey's pregnancy in Somerset while her husband remains working in London, is as strongly feminist, incorporating much information about female physiology and pregnancy. In The President's Child Isabel, the mother of an American presidential candidate's illegitimate child, is ruthlessly hunted in a parody of a thriller. The Life and Loves of a She-Devil describes Ruth's remorseless revenge on the bestseller writer who "stole" her husband.

Two of Weldon's collections of short stories, Watching Me, Watching You and Polaris and Other Stories, are mainly concerned with men exploiting women in different domestic settings: an exception, the title story of the latter, is the best. Its antiwar theme is continued in The Shrapnel Academy: over the snowbound weekend of the Academy's prestigious Wellington Lecture, the contemporary "servant problem" with a largely Third World staff escalates into a "local" nuclear explosion. Chapters of military history, describing warfare's "development," break up the story.

The Hearts and Lives of Men, set against the 1960s swinging London art market, more frothily charts the marriages—mainly to each other—of a trendy pair and the fraught childhood of their kidnapped daughter. In The Heart of the Country Sonia, now in a psychiatric hospital, explains her attempts to help Natalie, suddenly abandoned by her husband. Weldon parades the countryside's problems, from pesticides to the withdrawal of buses.

As one of the dead able to "re-wind" their life-stories, Gabriella reviews her lovers in the novella The Rules of Life set in 2004. In Leader of the Band "Starlady Sandra," incidentally the result of a genetic experiment, abandons astronomy, TV program, and husband to accompany "mad Jack the trumpet-player" and his jazz band on tour in France.

The Cloning of Joanne May, set in the present day, shows Joanna secretly cloned by her husband, so that she has four sisters, young enough to be her daughters—all brought together by the plot. Darcy's Utopia is structured by the device of two journalists interviewing the notorious Mrs. Darcy, wife of an imprisoned government economic adviser; the journalists also have an affair. Despite much space, Darcy's ideas for a money-less and permissive society remain arbitrary and contradictory.

Although Weldon has widened her range, and has always used techniques of "alienation" to encourage the reader to think as well as feel, she has also increasingly relied on her unique narrative techniques, with her often deliberately intrusive authorial voice, to sustain each novel. In Big Girls Don't Cry, Weldon's twentieth novel, she pokes fun at the feminist movement—or as it was called in 1971, the setting of the book, "women's lib." The stories in A Hard Time to Be a Father are also characteristically impish, giving notice to Weldon fans that they will not be disappointed.