Fay Weldon, a mischievous and prolific British author who explored women’s lives and relationships in novels such as “The Life and Loves of a She-Devil,” challenging assumptions about gender, love and domesticity while acquiring a reputation as both a feminist and an anti-feminist, died Jan. 4 at a nursing home in Northampton, England. She was 91.
Her son Dan confirmed the death. Ms. Weldon “had a number of strokes,” he said in an email, but was still working until her death, “writing poems in her head and dictating slowly.”
A highly public author with an easy laugh and distinctive blonde bob, Ms. Weldon wrote more than 30 novels as well as short story collections, children’s books, and television, radio and stage plays. Her work was filled with acerbic humor, sexual satire and farcical scenarios, distinguished by an understated literary style that she described as “completely practical and always precise.”
Much of it was also semi-autobiographical — inspired, she said, by her “mildly scandalous” early life, which included a nomadic upbringing in New Zealand and England, single motherhood at age 22, and a marriage to a high school headmaster who, according to Ms. Weldon, pimped her out to friends and advised her to get a job as an escort.
At age 35, she “stopped living and started writing instead, as a serious person,” as she put in her 2002 autobiography, “Auto Da Fay.” While sitting on the stairs so that she could keep an eye on her young children (she had four sons in all, her last at age 47), she wrote screenplays for shows including “Upstairs, Downstairs,” an acclaimed period drama about English servants and their masters, winning a Writers’ Guild of Great Britain award for writing the 1971 pilot.
She also began publishing wry novels and family dramas, defying literary convention by populating her books with protagonists who were women rather than men, plump rather than petite. She later recalled that male writers were furious that she dared to write about issues like dieting and marriage, telling the Daily Mail: “Men would walk out of rooms when I walked in because they were so angry and upset that women were no longer willing to iron men’s shirts.”
Soon her books were climbing bestseller lists in Britain and receiving praise on both sides of the Atlantic.
Her novel “Praxis” (1978), about the shifting mind-set of a woman with a rickety childhood, two unsuccessful marriages, a career as a prostitute and an incestuous relationship, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Britain’s most prestigious literary award. Ms. Weldon was vaulted to greater fame with her novel “The Life and Loves of a She-Devil” (1983), about a lantern-jawed woman named Ruth who, driven by envy and a desire for revenge, undergoes plastic surgery to look like her husband’s lover.
“It affords a scintillating, mind-boggling, vicarious thrill for any reader who has ever fantasized dishing out retribution for one wrong or another,” New York Times reviewer Rosalyn Drexler wrote. The book was adapted into a prizewinning BBC miniseries and a much-maligned Hollywood movie, “She-Devil” (1989), starring Meryl Streep and Roseanne Barr. Decades later, Guardian journalist Claire Armistead said the novel “licensed a generation of second-wave feminists to own their inner demon.”
“It seemed to me when I wrote [the novel] that women were so much in the habit of being good,” Ms. Weldon told the Guardian, “it would do nobody any harm if they learned to be a little bad — that is to say, burn down their houses, give away their children, put their husband in prison, steal his money and turn themselves into their husband’s mistress.”
Yet Ms. Weldon also came to believe the feminist movement had gone astray, with women too often claiming the role of victim. To the horror of many longtime allies, she told a radio interviewer in 1998 that rape “isn’t the worst thing that can happen to a woman,” arguing that society “glamorizes” sexual assault by viewing it as especially horrific. She later questioned the significance of the pay gap between men and women, declared that men had become casualties of the gender war, and appeared to be skeptical of transgender rights, saying that because “women have it better than men,” some men were “fighting back by becoming women themselves.”
Still, she continued to champion women’s liberation, and it was often difficult to tell when she was expressing her genuine beliefs or simply trying to provoke and entertain. Laughing through interviews, she acknowledged fabricating stories and details about her life to liven up the conversation, and estimated that “about 60 percent” of what she told journalists was true. In some cases, it seemed that Ms. Weldon herself was unsure of what had really happened; at the very least, she was struggling to make sense of it.
“I long for a day of judgment when the plot lines of our lives will be neatly tied, and all puzzles explained, and the meaning of events made clear,” she wrote at the opening of her autobiography. “We take to fiction, I suppose, because no such thing is going to happen, and at least on the printed page we can observe beginnings, middles and ends, and can find out where morality resides.”
The younger of two girls, she was born Franklin Birkinshaw in Alvechurch, Worcestershire, on Sept. 22, 1931. Her father, Frank, was a physician who had worked as a driver for British army officer T.E. Lawrence in the Middle East. Her mother, the former Margaret Jepson, was herself a novelist and the daughter of another author, Edgar Jepson, whose literary acquaintances included T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.
Ms. Weldon’s parents had moved to New Zealand shortly before her birth, and she was raised there with her older sister, Jane, as their parents’ marriage collapsed. Her mother went on to raise the children alone, supporting the family by writing serialized romance and adventure novels. After World War II, they returned to Britain, where Ms. Weldon earned a scholarship to a London girls’ school and studied at the University of St Andrews in Scotland.
After stints as a waitress and hospital orderly, she joined the British Foreign Office, where she wrote propaganda leaflets that were airdropped on Poland during the Cold War. In her early 20s, she had a son, Nick, from a relationship with Colyn Davies, a musician and nightclub doorman whom she left for a brief marriage to Ronald Bateman, a headmaster who was 25 years her senior and, according to Ms. Weldon, simply wanted a child and wife for his résumé.
She later wrote about the marriage in the third person, distancing herself from the relationship in her autobiography.
“What is so odd is that until you wrote about the experience, you didn’t really see it,” she told the Guardian, referring to herself in the second person. “The extraordinariness of it escaped you because it always does when you’re living through something. It’s only afterwards, when you look at little patches of your life, that you realize that it was absolutely insane.”
By the late 1950s, Ms. Weldon was working as a copywriter for an advertising firm, helping to create the egg-industry slogan “Go to work on an egg,” which endured for years, and suggesting the line “Vodka gets you drunker quicker” for a liquor campaign, which her bosses rejected.
Her experience writing concise, snappy ad copy came in handy when she launched her literary career in the early 1960s, shortly after marrying her second husband, Ron Weldon, a musician-turned-antiques dealer. She adapted one of her TV scripts into her debut novel, “The Fat Woman’s Joke” (1967), and later worked on screen projects including a BBC miniseries adaptation of “Pride and Prejudice” (1980).
After three decades of marriage, Ms. Weldon’s husband left her for his “astrological therapist.” He died in 1994, the day his divorce to Ms. Weldon was finalized. Within a year, she married Nick Fox, a poet and bookseller who became her manager. They settled in a 19th-century stone house in Dorset, where Ms. Weldon continued to write, publishing books including “Chalcot Crescent” (2009), a dystopian novel about the future of capitalism, and “Death of a She Devil” (2017), the sequel to her earlier hit.
In 2020, she announced that she was getting a divorce.
Survivors include her son Nick; two sons from her second marriage, Dan and Sam; a stepdaughter, Karen; 12 grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren. Another son from her second marriage, Tom, died in 2019.
Ms. Weldon was named a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2001 for services to literature, shortly after she gained notoriety in the literary world for her novel “The Bulgari Connection.” The book was sponsored by the jewelry company Bulgari, which paid for Ms. Weldon to reference its products. She had worried the tie-in would sully her literary reputation, she told the Times, but ultimately decided it wouldn’t make a difference: “They never give me the Booker Prize anyway.”
“My sentences are too short, and if you want to win prizes, and be taken seriously as a literary writer, you have to take out all the jokes,” she later told the Guardian. “I’ve judged enough prizes in my time to know the most boring book wins. And that’s not the book you want to write.”
