Fay Weldon was
born in Worcester, England in 1931 (or 1933). Her father was a doctor
and her mother was a writer of commercial fiction under the pen
name "Pearl Bellairs." Her parents divorced when she
was five, after which her family moved to New Zealand. She lived
with her mother, sister and grandmother until she started college
and, as a result, grew up believing "the world was peopled
by females.
She returned to England
with her mother and studied economics and psychology at the
University of St Andrews in Scotland.
Her actual christened
name was "Franklin Birkinshaw" (something to do with
her mother's interest in numerology) which she feels contributed
to her being accepted at St. Andrews and permitted to study
economics: the school assumed she was a male student applicant.
In her early twenties
she was briefly married to a man more than twenty years her
senior. It is not clear whether she had her first son during this
marriage or earlier.
Raising her son as a
single mother, she looks back on her twenties as times fraught
with "odd jobs and hard times." She worked on the
problem page of the Daily Mirror and then as a copywriter for the
Foreign Office. She then embarked on an extremely successful
career as an advertising copywriter becoming famous for her
slogan 'Go to work on an egg'.
"Advertising was
the only thing I could do in order to earn a decent enough living.
. . I did it for about eight years."
She married Roy Weldon
in 1962 and had three more sons. She then went through a mid-life
crisis: "I was thirty, inadequate and depressed and ignorant,
and knew it." She went through psychoanalysis, which gave
her the self-knowledge and courage to give up advertising and
start writing. Her first novel, The Fat Woman's Joke,
was published in 1967, but by then she had already written some
fifty plays for radio, stage, or television, the most well-known
being Upstairs, Downstairs and her
adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.
For the next 30 years
she built a wonderfully successful career, publishing over 20
novels, collections of short stories, television movies,
newspaper and magazine articles and becoming a well-known face
and voice on the BBC. She and Ron divided their time between
bucolic splendour in Somerset and a flat in London.
However, he appears to
have been very much like the philandering husbands in her books
because, like the plot of one of her novels (Affliction),
he left her, refused to speak to her for 2 years and went off
with his new-age therapist who had convinced him they were
astrologically compatible. The day after their divorce came
through in June 1994, Ron dropped dead of a stroke.
Fay subsequently married
Nick Fox, a poet 15 years her junior, and her writing and career
continue to flourish. They live in Hamptead, London.
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