Fay Weldon's skill at satire, wry humor, and witty prose have helped to establish her reputation as a novelist whose primary subjects are the lives and natures of women. She is also an accomplished stage, radio, and television playwright. Weldon 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. After writing more than twenty novels and many short stories, she has achieved both critical and popular success, and her work has been translated into fifteen languages. She has acquired in her later years a considerable public persona, her image drawn no doubt from some of her more-recent fictional heroines. A gift for mythologizing is apparent in her work and no less so in her representations of herself.

Weldon was born on 22 September 1931 in the village of Alvechurch in Worcestershire...