Showing results by author "Fay Weldon" in All Categories

Fay Weldon CBE was an award-winning author and self-declared feminist. Weldon's work features what she described as "overweight, plain women" – as she deliberately sought, she said, to write about and give a voice to women who are often overlooked or not featured in the media. She said there...

Ruth Patchett never thought of herself as particularly devilish. Rather the opposite in fact - simply a tall, not terribly attractive woman living a quiet life as a wife and mother in a respectable suburb. But when she discovers that her husband is having a passionate affair with the lovely romantic novelist Mary Fisher, she is so seized by envy that she becomes truly diabolic. Within weeks she has burnt down the family home, collected the insurance, made love to the local drunk and embarked on a course of destruction and revenge.

Consider Vivien in November 1922: she is twenty-four, and a spinster. She wears fashionable clothes, but she is plain and - almost worse in those times - intelligent. At nearly six foot tall, she is known unkindly by her family as ‘the giantess.' Fortunately, Vivien is rich, so she can travel...

Helen Lally is 22, the stunning daughter of an impoverished artist whose fame and fortune will soon be made. Woe to her for catching the eye of Clifford Wexford, a 35-year-old art dealer, rapaciously ambitious, eminently eligible and careless of all lives but his own. In the space of nine months in the ever-so-swinging '60s, Helen and Clifford meet, fall instantly in love, marry and produce the enchanting Nell. But there the want changes hands, as it will, time and again, in the course of this seductively high-spirited move.

In Fay Weldon's 1983 classic, The Life and Loves of a She Devil, women fought men for power and won. In 2017, men take the ultimate step to get their power back. Ruth Patchett, the original ‘She Devil,’ is now eighty-four and keen to retire. But who can take up her mantle? Enter Ruth's...

How to be a reader - how to be a writer. All you need to know. Alice is an 18-year-old student and aspiring novelist with green spiky hair, a child of the modern age who recoils at the idea of reading Jane Austen. In a sequence of letters reminiscent of Jane Austen's to her own niece, 'aunt' Fay examines the rewards of such study. Not only is her correspondence a revealing tribute to a great writer - it is also an original and rewarding exploration of the craft of fiction itself.

Reviewers have been describing Fay Weldon's inimitable voice for years. Now, here is Fay Weldon in her own words, selecting and introducing her favourite short stories from across her career as one of Britain's foremost contemporary novelists...

How many women can you fit into one body? A novel of split personalities. A marriage, its breakdown, and a perforated heroine: one woman, many faces, many personalities, and more emerging: a crumbling house, and the rooms of that house (which in our dreams are aspects of the self). Any more...

Ten high achieving ladies are gathered together in the week between Christmas and the New Year, at the expensive Castle Spa, seeking, through Botox, aromatherapy and general all round pampering, a new beginning to their lives. The Ladies lounge around in the Jacuzzi, drinking champagne and...

Walter Matthau stars in the story of a climate scientist trying to balance romance and research. The piece is both serious and surreal as Matthau removes the “fourth wall” while addressing the show’s recording engineer. An L.A. Theatre Works full-cast performance featuring Barbara Bain, Zeljko Ivanek and Valerie Landsburg. Directed by Shaun McLoughlin. Recorded before a live audience in Santa Monica, California, in June 1992.

An astonishing novel that probes into the strange world of genetic engineering. Joanna May thought herself unique, indivisible – until one day, to her hideous shock, she discovered herself to be five: though childless she was a mother; though an only child she was surrounded by sisters young...

The fantasy of the wronged woman made real: wild funny and true. "The fun grows steadily blacker and wilder." The Guardian When Ruth Pratchett discovers her husband is having a passionate affair with the lovely romantic novelist Mary Fisher, she is so seized by envy she becomes truly diabolic...

A novel about the perfect pair – or are they? Annette and Spicer make a perfect pair: he thirty-nine, wide-shouldered, square-jawed, and often likened to Harrison Ford; she slight, fair, delicately featured, and sometimes likened to Meryl Streep. He with a son (Jason, eleven) from a previous...

In Eden Grove leben lauter glückliche Frauen. Ihre Ehemänner sind erfolgreich. Sie haben muntere Kinder und das Familienleben ist ganz harmonisch. Eden Grove ist eine friedliche kleine Welt - aber nicht für alle. Es gibt zum Beispiel die unattraktive Ruth. Gattin eines Steuerberaters und Mutter zweier Kinder. Ruth ist loyal, und sie erträgt lange die sexuellen Eskapaden ihres Mannes. Aber es kommt der Punkt, an dem Ruth die Geduld verliert. Sie dreht den Spieß um und plant einen Rachefeldzug.

Brought to you by Penguin. The Mermaid Collection A classic from beloved national treasure Fay Weldon sees four women break the shackles of patriarchy and domesticity in 1950s London, from the author of The Lives and Loves of a She-Devil With a foreword by Jenny Colgan ‘Down among the women...

Beverley may be close to ninety, but when her granddaughter announces her plans to leave home and husband for a glamorous actor, she’s already considering how she can stir up a little trouble. And so are the kehua outside. Quite how these Maori ghosts arrived outside the kitchen window is the origin of your writer’s tale. Suffice to say that everyone is haunted by the traumas of the past, that Beverley’s female bloodline carry a weighty spiritual burden - and that murder is at the root of it all....

From the award-winning novelist and writer of Upstairs Downstairs, the launch of a brilliant new trilogy about what life was really like for masters and servants before the world of Downton Abbey As the Season of 1899 comes to an end, the world is poised on the brink of profound, irrevocable...

Fay Weldon has been one of the most consistently successful of Britain's contemporary women's authors with a career stretching over 30 years. Her prolific output alternating between television plays and vigorous novels such as The Life and Loves of a She-Devil articulate a contemporary feminist...

Praxis Duveen is a survivor. At five years old, in 1920s England, she is still innocent, the product of an unstable mother and a flighty father who abandoned Praxis and her half-crazy sister, Hypatia. As the decades fly by, Praxis experiences many incarnations. Now, from her dingy basement apartment, where she's attempting to write a memoir, Praxis tells about the story of her remarkable journey - peppered with more than a few detours along the way.

Ten high achieving ladies are gathered together in the week between Christmas and the New Year, at the expensive Castle Spa, seeking, through Botox, aromatherapy and general all round pampering, a new beginning to their lives.