LONDON (AP) — British author Faye Weldon, known for her astute wit and poignant observations of women’s experiences and sexual politics in novels such as The Life and Love of the Devil, has died, her family says. said Wednesday. She was 91 years old.
Wheldon was a playwright, screenwriter, and prolific novelist who produced 30 novels, as well as short stories and plays written for television, radio, and the stage. She was one of the writers on the popular 1970s drama her series Upstairs, Downstairs, which won an award from the Writers Guild of America for the show’s first episode.
“It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of author, essayist and playwright Fay Weldon (CBE). She passed away peacefully this morning, January 4, 2023,” she said. The family said in a statement released by their agent.
Much of Weldon’s fiction deals with issues surrounding the relationships between women and men, children, parents, and each other, including Down Among The Women (1971) and Female Friends (1975).
“I don’t think my book is a critique … I think of it as an observation,” she once said in an Associated Press interview. No woman is young, attractive, intelligent, and childless.”
“Her Life and Love” was the story of an ugly woman who changed her body and life in search of revenge on her merciful husband.It was also made into a TV series and a movie starring Meryl Streep.
Her 1978 novel Praxis was a finalist for the prestigious Booker Prize for fiction.
Weldon’s books were often feminist, but she is also known for her controversial views of feminism in her later years. In 1998, she was criticized for claiming in an interview with Radio Times magazine that “rape is not the worst thing that can happen to a woman if she is safe, alive and unmarked afterwards.” She said her comment was misunderstood.
Born in England in September 1931, Wheldon grew up in New Zealand and returned to England as a child. She studied economics and psychology at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, and worked briefly at the Foreign Office in London, where she worked as a journalist before she became an advertising copywriter.
She published her first novel, The Fat Woman’s Joke, in 1967. In 2002, at the age of 70, she published her memoir, Auto Da Fay. Her story describes what she called her “mildly scandalous life until her mid-thirties”, concluding in 1963 when her novelist career began. rice field.
“The sad truth is that my theory is that no one cares much about what happens to women after they turn 35. That’s when I quit Auto da Fay. .the age when I stopped living and started writing instead.I’m a serious person,” she wrote on her website.
Weldon was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2001 for his services to literature.
