Dead Fay Weldon, novelist with an ironic look on women – Corriere.it

The British writer Fay Weldonauthor who challenged feminist orthodoxy with the dark satire to explore the divisions between men and women, she died on Wednesday, January 4 at the age of 91. The announcement of her passing was made by her family through her literary agent. A novelist, essayist and playwright, she was best known for her best-selling novel “The Life and Love of a She-devil” from 1983 (Feltrinelli, 1984), from which the film was based «She Devil – She, the devil» (1989), directed by Susan Seidelman and starring Meryl Streep.

The author has published more than 30 novels throughout his career – where he often with great irony traces the couple dynamics — as well as short story collections, television films and journalism articles, contributing occasionally to various magazines, as well as being one of the BBC’s most respected voices. Born in Alvechurch, Worcester on 22 September 1931, Fay Weldon, whose real name was Franklin Birkinshaw Weldon, at five years he moves with mother and grandmother in New Zeland following the parental divorce. She returned home and graduated in psychology and economics at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. She debuts nshe fiction in 1967 with «Fat Woman Joke», preceded by various jobs as author of television and radio shows, including the important TV adaptation of Jane Austen’s masterpiece “Pride and Prejudice”broadcast by the BBC.

His novels often have like female protagonists who seek to out of the role imposed on them by society and for this they have often been called feminists, even if in some respects irregular. Fay Weldon came up with her own sarcastic narrative devices on subordination of women and on oppression of a male-dominated societyexposing the weaknesses of both sexes grappling with the greyishand ofbourgeois existence. Weldon’s women are often opaque figures, ready to be deceived, whose blindness, whose inner weaknesses are part of the representation of akneaded existence of stereotypes and of hypocrisy.

Numerous the books of the writer translated into Italian, including: “Down among women” (The turtle, 1993), “The friends of the heart” (The turtle, 1994), “The trap” (The turtle, 2009), “The heart and the life of men” (Mondadori, 1989), “The Other Lives of Joanna May” (Mondadori, 1990), “The Life Force” (Feltrinelli, 1993), “The Worst Fears” (Fazi, 2002), “The Stepmother’s Diaries” (The turtle, 2010), «After the crash» (E/O, 2010). Fay Weldon is also author of essays and biographies like Rebecca West’s.

In its autobiography “Auto da Fay” (2002) – the title recalled with a play on words “autodafé”, a term derived from the Portuguese “leap of faith” used during the Spanish Inquisition – Weldon recounts the family story that marked her life as a child : his father it was a doctor And his mother a fiction writer trade under the pseudonym ‘Pearl Bellairs’. Her parents divorced her when she was five and she moved to New Zealand with her grandmother, mother and sister. The result of this all-female education is the conviction that «the world has been populated thanks to women».

After returning to England and the University studies in Scotland, when she was twenty she married a forty years old, by whom he will have his firstborn. The marriage did not last long: in 1962 she remarried in second marriage with Roy Weldon, a union crowned by others three children. Enter one midlife crisis: «I was sad, inadequate, depressed and ignorantand I knew it.” With psychoanalysis he regains self-esteem and finds the bravery to start writing, with his debut in 1967.

Weldon worked for the television and, before establishing herself as a novelist, for advertising. His starting point was the critique of a sweetened language And fraudulentof which women are victims (but also active promoters), and which spreads in the television soap operasin «pink» necklacesin the tabloid of the popular press, where they can be reconciled a feminism of pure facade and the soft porn of the naked girls on the third page. The road of awareness and therefore of vengeance, it is never precluded to its heroines.