Biography Essay

Fay Weldon, who is also a successful stage, radio, and television playwright, established her reputation as a novelist by writing tart, intelligent, and often comic fictions about the lives and natures of women. A satirist with a sharp sense of the ridiculous, adept at wry humor and witty prose, she has the feminist urge to improve women's attitudes toward themselves and their sisters and an imagination fertile in finding unusual embodiments for her independent attitudes and unsentimental values.

Born in the village of Alvechurch in Worcestershire, Weldon was to continue a family tradition with her writing. Her father, Frank Thornton Birkinshaw, was a physician, but her mother, Margaret Jepson Birkinshaw, published two light novels in the 1930s under her maiden name. Weldon's grandfather Edgar Jepson, a turn-of-thecentury editor of Vanity Fair, was a prolific writer of best-seller romances of adventure until the 1930s; her uncle, Selwyn...