Fay Weldon’s Blog
A note to my readers
Note: This was Fay's last post to this site, published 1st November 2020. This week I sent the following email to friends and colleagues, and I would now like to share it with my readers. Dear Friends and Colleagues, I've been out of touch for a long time, for which,...
Fay Weldon — novelist and writer 1931–20??
Note: Fay wrote this as the main Home page content for the original version of this site, in which form it was published on 11th January 2012. (It is interesting to speculate as to how and when and why the two question marks above will eventually be filled in. Believe...
Fay Weldon 22 September 1931 — 4 January 2023
Fay died at a care home in Northampton, England, close to family and friends, on 4 January 2023, at the age of 91. Her last post to this site, just less than a year ago, was an apology to her readers for a too-long silence. Her voice, through her books, remains as...
Plain or pretty?
This is an article the Daily Mail commissioned in March but didn’t run: PLAIN OR PRETTY? I started out as a plump, cheerful child. I turned into a plump, frivolous adult. Now I find myself described as an apple-cheeked, smiley old lady. I’d be happier to have been be...
Sad
Our friend David Hugh Prysor-Jones died last month. We miss him. Rest his soul. 'Hugh Prysor-Jones was a brilliant journalist and consummate broadcaster across a range of BBC radio and television programmes for 20 years. But his natural home was as presenter of the...
Is God a woman?
The Daily Mail asked me earlier this week, I said – “Since ‘God moves in a mysterious way’, I am surprised more men don’t think the Deity is female.” I don't know how one deals with such a question, but my husband had a go in his song In the Name of the Mother, which...
The changing face of middle-age
Life no longer begins at 40, more’s the pity. Once when a woman reached that age her children would be grown, and she’d have spare time available to think about her looks and her own pleasure and interests. She was expected to be married and a mother by the age of 23...
Freeze Eggs, Freeze Eggs!
This is the title of a story I once wrote (back in 2001 when such things were just a gleam in a geneticist’s eye.) Do it, do it! I cried then, even as I quaver now: it can be done, and is being done. If you’re a fertile young woman, and any employer is offering to...
Untouchables
The new young, by which I mean those of the social media generations, seem to fear physical contact. They prefer not to sit close on the family sofa to watch TV: they’d rather watch in their rooms, on tablets, iphones, laptops, or failing all else their mobile. They...
A different kind of reading, a different kind of writing
A recent Bookseller survey suggests there’s now a different kind of reader coming over the horizon. Ninety percent of book-buyers read digital books – not exclusively, but they do own a Kindle or similar device (Kindle predominates.) The books which sell best in...
Nine reasons why women don’t want to have babies
The UK’s total fertility rate is 1.82, way below replacement rate of 2.1. Our population is shrinking. Not so fast as in some other European countries, though, where the overall rate is 1.59. Today’s average household size in the UK is 2.3 persons. 50 years ago it was...
Our public life: where have all the women gone?
I asked my mother – born in 1908 – why there were so few women in public life and she replied: ‘because they spend so much time combing their hair and looking in mirrors.’ I asked my father, a doctor – born in 1889 – and he replied: ‘because they have a space in their...
Sex, Birth and Population
Hans Rosling of the BCC’s statistical team tells us we don’t have to panic – world population is levelling out, and will stabilise at about 11 billion. The size of the average family the world over is now 2.5 children, as the news spreads that the larger the family,...
Pure frivolity… six females types. Which ones are you?
The sensuous woman She’s usually blonde by choice and runs to fat if she doesn’t diet scrupulously: difficult, because she does really like food. She’s sensitive – her skin marks easily: bruises, weals, bumps and hives come and go. Dress-wise she goes to extremes:...
Intelligence and jobs
I slept late on Sunday morning and woke to hear a jokey discussion on the radio about socialism and capitalism, which were terms I was brought up with, but whose meaning has changed over the decades. So that when Ed Milliband talks about democratic socialism the young...
Myths of modern women: 1
What drove me to feminism fifty years ago was the myth that men were the breadwinners and women kept house and looked pretty. Male work colleague to me: You mustn’t take promotion. It’s taking the bread out of a working man’s mouth. Female Tax inspector to me: But...
My battle with the Scientists
The battle began when I was sixteen and told my teachers I wanted to be a doctor. I was moved into the science stream, never having had a science lesson in my life. We’re talking about a good girls’ school in the 1940s. The chemistry teacher had reached her 90th...
Ask the children
Nobody asks the children... We are told by the Daily Mail that mothers who stay home to look after their children are ‘happier than women who go out to work’. They don’t ask what kind of mother, what kind of work, so it doesn’t tell us very much. ‘Mother’ is so...
Anorexic nation
For me clothes began as a source of anxiety, rather than of pleasure. Would it fit? Would there be anything that would fit? I arrived in England on my fifteenth birthday, a child from New Zealand too well-fed on butter and meat, into a war-torn, hungry England....
The slow strangling of TV drama
I found myself looking forward to the final episode of The Fall last week, if against my will. The Fall – a second series is proposed – is the BBC’s current offering in the thriller serial genre, and stars the amazingly beautiful and talented Gillian Anderson who...
Esprit d’escalier
June 2013 Yesterday I came face to face with untrammelled youth and lost the encounter. I was the one who stepped aside. It was a clash of wills; age lost and youth won, as in the end I suppose it must. It was a pity because I represent age. I stepped aside; the...
It’s May, which means nearly June
May 2013: I’m back to this site after too long an absence – I have been neglectful; sorry, all. But I have just finished the third of the Love and Inheritance trilogy – my first attempt at a historical novel, multiplied by three – and am able to pay attention to other...
Scandinavian outings: Denmark
April 2013: Denmark There are good festivals and bad ones. One has to be careful. A badly-organised one, (often the case when students do the organising – they can have difficulty realising that even if you’re a writer you’re not a figment of the imagination but have...
Scandinavian outings: Norway
March, 2013 : Norway The temperature in Oslo was minus 17 and I hadn’t finished The New Countess, third in the trilogy, as I had hoped. It just wouldn’t finish easily. On the other hand a week out in a really cold climate might shock my brain into some useful new...