Fay Weldon

Standard Name: Weldon, Fay
Birth Name: Franklin Birkinshaw
Nickname: Fay
Self-constructed Name: Fay Davies
Married Name: Franklin Bateman
Married Name: Franklin Weldon
Married Name: Franklin Fox
Internationally acclaimed as a novelist, playwright and essayist, FW is a prolific writer whose work ranges over many genres and media, and in 2017 amounted to thirty-four novels, seven short-story volumes, three books for children, and six non-fictional works.
Armitstead, Claire. “Fay Weldon: ’Feminism was a success, but then you lose a generation’”. theguardian.com.
Her fiction is translated into over a dozen languages. She has written numerous television and radio dramas, stage plays, non-fictional articles and studies, autobiography and experimental or mock autobiography. She has never, she says, written poetry.
Colour photo of Fay Weldon standing in a library at an event during the Oxford Literary Festival, 3 April 2011. She wears a grey top and a colourful patterened scarf.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Travel Iris Murdoch
After IM 's stimulating visit to Paris in 1947, that city became permanently necessary in her life.
Conradi, Peter J. Iris Murdoch. A Life. HarperCollins.
254-5
Later, Murdoch and her husband visited many parts of the world, either on holiday (Scotland,...
Textual Production Joanna Trollope
JT 's modernised retelling of Sense and Sensibility (published in October 2013), is one of a series of projected Jane Austen updates. In January 2014 Trollope discussed Austen in a podcast with Fay Weldon in...
Textual Production Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice has been many times adapted for the theatre and for the large and small screens. Both A. A. Milne and the Australian dramatist Helen Jerome produced stage versions during the 1930s, and...
Textual Production Mary Brunton
Though Mary McKerrow calls MBforgotten in the title of her carefully-researched biography, and though Fay Weldon 's foreword says of Brunton's writing only that it continues to be a source of pleasure ....
Textual Production Rosalind Coward
RC published Sacred Cows: Is Feminism Relevant to the New Millennium?
The title Sacred Cows had been used by Fay Weldon ten years earlier.
“Bowker’s Global Books in Print”. globalbooksinprint.com.
Textual Production Christina Stead
This was a novel about her former boyfriend Keith Duncan . It began in the early 1930s as The Young Man Will Go Far then became The Travelling Scholar before acquiring its final title.
Rowley, Hazel. Christina Stead: A Biography. Secker and Warburg.
137
Textual Features Michelene Wandor
This includes work by Nora Bartlett , Sara Maitland , Judith Kazantzis , Wendy Mulford , Libby Houston , Cora Kaplan , Michèle Roberts , Angela Carter , Noel Greig , Rozsika Parker , Alison Hennegan
Textual Features Susan Hill
This is a remarkably informal quarterly: the sketch on its cover shows a bouncing mad-hatter figure with a bunch of flowers in his hand and a pile of books on his head. While endearingly open...
Reception Penelope Fitzgerald
Mollie Hardwick in Books and Bookmen pronounced this to be a delicate water-colour of a novel, small and charming.
“Contemporary Authors”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Centre-LRC.
PF 's winning of the coveted, ten-thousand-pound Booker Prize for it suggests that others saw more...
Publishing Mary Stott
Together with Pamela Anderson and Fay Weldon , Mary Stott published Simple Steps to Public Life, with illustrations by Tony Bethall .
British Library Catalogue. http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?dscnt=0&tab=local_tab&dstmp=1489778087340&vid=BLVU1&mode=Basic&fromLo.
Performance of text Ann Jellicoe
AJ produced another community play for Lyme Regis: Western Women, based on a story by Fay Weldon .
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
233
Jellicoe, Ann. Community Plays. Methuen.
31
Occupation Ann Jellicoe
The Trust set out to produce historical community plays with west-country associations, including works written for it by Fay Weldon and David Edgar . With some difficulty, AJ succeeded in securing ongoing funding for it...
Occupation Bernice Rubens
When she first moved to London she worked as a so-called lady's maid (a job for which she was totally unqualified).
Rubens, Bernice. When I Grow Up. Time Warner Books.
74-5
Then she was taken on to teach English at Burgess Hill School ...
Literary responses Eva Figes
Fay Weldon praised this novel as half poetry, half prose.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
Literary responses Maggie Gee
MG says that reviews were almost uniformly ecstatic. The book was praised by Rose Tremain and listed as Book of the Week by the Mail on Sunday.
Gee, Maggie. My Animal Life. Telegram Books.
189
Fay Weldon , calling this novel...

Timeline

22 September 1955: BBC television acquired its first commercially...

Building item

22 September 1955

BBC television acquired its first commercially sponsored competitor when ITV (Independent Television) began broadcasting alternative programmes.

June 1972: Spare Rib, a feminist periodical issued monthly...

Women writers item

June 1972

Spare Rib, a feminist periodical issued monthly by Spare Ribs from 27 Clerkenwell Close, London, was launched to put women's liberation on the news stands.
Doughan, David, and Denise Sanchez. Feminist Periodicals, 1855-1984. Harvester Press.
86

August 2007: The British Council, promoter of British...

National or international item

August 2007

The British Council , promoter of British culture in other countries, cut by forty million US dollars the cost of its activity in Europe, in order to expand its activities in the Middle East and...

Texts

Weldon, Fay. Action Replay. Samuel French, 1980.
Weldon, Fay. Affliction. HarperCollins, 1993.
Weldon, Fay. Auto da Fay. Flamingo, 2002.
Weldon, Fay. Big Women. Flamingo, 1997.
Weldon, Fay. “Bottom Drawer: What Fay Weldon never got published”. Mslexia, No. 38, p. 22.
Weldon, Fay. Chalcot Crescent. Atlantic Books Corvus, 2009.
Weldon, Fay. Darcy’s Utopia. Collins, 1990.
Weldon, Fay. Death of a She Devil. Head of Zeus, 2017.
Weldon, Fay. Down Among the Women. Heinemann, 1971.
Weldon, Fay. Female Friends. Heinemann, 1975.
Weldon, Fay, and Mary McKerrow. “Foreword”. Mary Brunton, The Forgotten Scottish Novelist, Orcadian, 2001, p. xi - xii.
Weldon, Fay. Growing Rich. Flamingo, 1992.
Weldon, Fay. Habits of the House. Head of Zeus, 2012.
Weldon, Fay. I Love My Love. Samuel French, 1984.
Trollope, Joanna, and Fay Weldon. Joanna Trollope and Fay Weldon discuss Jane Austen. http://www.theguardian.com/books/audio/2014/jan/03/jane-austen-weldon-trollope-podcast.
Weldon, Fay. Kehua!. Atlantic Corvus, 2010.
Weldon, Fay. Leader of the Band. Hodder and Stoughton, 1988.
Weldon, Fay. Letters to Alice: On First Reading Jane Austen. Michael Joseph/Rainbird, 1984.
Weldon, Fay. Life Force. HarperCollins, 1992.
Weldon, Fay. Mantrapped. Fourth Estate, 2004.
Weldon, Fay. “Me and My Shadows”. On Gender and Writing, edited by Michelene Wandor, Pandora Press, 1983, pp. 160-5.
Weldon, Fay. Mischief: Fay Weldon Selects Her Best Short Stories. Head of Zeus, 2015.
Weldon, Fay. Moon over Minneapolis. HarperCollins, 1991.
Weldon, Fay, and Elaine Feinstein, editors. New Stories 4. Hutchinson, 1979.
Weldon, Fay. Polaris. Penguin, 1989.