Writer Fay Weldon dies aged 91 | Fay Weldon

Fay Weldon, who chronicled the ups and downs of British life in novels, tv drama, performs and quick tales for greater than 5 many years, has died on the age of 91, her son Dan Weldon has confirmed.

Weldon chronicled a lifetime of class and sexual revolution in additional than 30 novels, together with The Life and Loves of a She-Satan, Splitting and the Booker Prize, Praxis. The sharp dialogue, scathing wit and satirical power of her fiction have been cast on the planet of stage and tv, the place she labored as a screenwriter for ITV’s Upstairs Downstairs and an adaptation of Delight and Prejudice for the BBC.

The author Jenny Colgan tweeted about the news: Weldon was “FORMIDABLE and FIERCE and WONDERFUL and really type to me and SPLENDID,” she mentioned.

Born in 1931 in a Worcestershire village, Weldon spent her early years in New Zealand, the place her father was a health care provider. On the finish of the Second World Struggle she returned to England together with her mom and studied at St Andrews earlier than changing into pregnant and marrying Ronald Bateman, 25 years her senior. In her 2002 autobiography car yes fay, Weldon described that Bateman was not taken with intercourse and inspired her to work as a hostess at a Soho nightclub. After breaking apart with Bateman, Weldon labored as a copywriter and got here up with the slogan “Work on an egg‘ and married jazz trumpeter Ronald Weldon.

She started writing screenplays for radio and tv and has appeared on collection reminiscent of ITV’s Armchair Theater and BBC’s Wednesday Play. An ITV drama, The Fats Lady’s Joke grew to become her first novel, printed in 1967. Esther Sussman, despairing of her husband’s obsession with weight-reduction plan, retreats to a basement in Earl’s Courtroom, the place she reads science fiction, watches TV and eats. There she is visited by a good friend, her son, her husband and his secretary and rails in opposition to married life. The Observer hailed the agency planning of this “auspicious debut” and a mode that was “a potent instrument of comedian mockery,” judging that Weldon “possessed the form of expertise that dispenses with equity and social conscience” and “is changing into a voice straightforward to recollect”.

With 4 extra novels to seem over the following decade, and a string of performs and screenplays, there was little probability {that a} voice as acid and energetic as Weldon’s could be forgotten. Her sixth novel, Praxis, tells the story of a girl who performs a wide range of roles – employee, prostitute, spouse, mom, lyricist and feminist chief – and finds herself committing adultery, incest and infanticide. Revealed in 1978, this “compelling and shifting … journey in feminism” was, in line with the Guardian, her “greatest novel but” and earned Weldon her solely look on the Booker Prize shortlist.

Weldon’s best-known novel, The Life and Love of a She-Satan, was printed 5 years later in 1983. Clumsy, “ugly” suburban housewife Ruth Patchett discovers her husband is leaving her and decides to show her world the wrong way up. “What I need is energy over males’s hearts and pockets,” Ruth declares, earlier than burning down her home, ruining her husband’s profession and driving his lover to despair via repeated transformations. The Observer known as it Weldon’s “nastiest novel but… probably the most mutilating form of satire whose solely ‘level’ is to throw you in opposition to the bars of your cage.” The BBC tailored it for tv in 1986, and a Hollywood model starring Meryl Streep and Roseanne Barr was launched three years later.

A mischievous and provocative determine, Weldon was by no means afraid to create a media storm. She once suggested that only 60% of what she told journalists was true. However clarify that Rape “is actually not the worst thing that can happen to a woman”or that “Women humiliate men the way men used to humiliate women” left some feminists accusing her of treason – an accusation she brushed apart, indicating that it actually was her “The one, the only feminist there is, and the others are all out of step”.

Weldon claimed she was philosophical about her comparative lack of literary awards. “My sentences are too quick” she told the Guardian in 2009, “and if you wish to win awards and be taken severely as a author, it’s a must to take all of the jokes out.” As for her private life, she claimed she’s “all the time been good in relationships, they simply have not been superb with me. However I’ve no regrets,” she added, “as a result of it is all good copy.”