Fay Weldon CBE, FRSL was an English author, essayist, and playwright. Over the course of her 55-year writing career, she published 31 novels, including Puffball, The Cloning of Joanna May, Wicked Women 1995) and The Bulgari Connection (2000), but was most well-known as the writer of The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1983) which was televised by the BBC in 1986.
Fay Weldon House: Where did Fay Weldon live?
Born in a Worcestershire village in 1931, Weldon spent her early years in New Zealand, where her father was a doctor. At the end of the second world war, she returned to England with her mother, and studied at St Andrew’s before becoming pregnant and marrying Ronald Bateman, a man 25 years her senior.
She began writing scripts for radio and television, contributing to series such as ITV’s Armchair Theatre and BBC’s Wednesday Play. An ITV drama, The Fat Woman’s Joke, would become her first novel, published in 1967. Esther Sussman despairs her husband’s enthusiasm for dieting and retreats to a basement in Earl’s Court where she reads science fiction, watches television, and eats.