Fay Weldon obituary: Shrewd, mischievous and outspoken

Fay Weldon was a sometimes arguable feminist, a prolific novelist, and a pistillate whose ain beingness not lone informed her fabrication but sometimes sounded similar the crippled of a lurid novel.

The American writer Alison Lurie likened her to Chaucer's Wife of Bath: a storyteller who had been joined respective times and was practical, comic and wise.

"Many of the stories she tells person the motivation of the Wife of Bath's Tale," Lurie added. "What women privation is their ain way. If they get it, they volition marque men happy; if not, not."

Fay Weldon was calved successful Britain but brought up successful New Zealand, the girl of a doctor, Frank Birkinshaw, and Margaret Jepson, a fledgling creator and novelist diverted by motherhood.

Art and infidelity ran successful the family. Her great-grandfather was a starring violinist, who had been fired from his station astatine the Royal College of Music for advocating escaped emotion and had fled to America, leaving his daughter, her grandmother, behind.

Her maternal gramps was a fashionable novelist, her grandma a budding performance pianist who abandoned performing to wed young.

Fay's mother, Margaret, besides joined young, prompted by her ain father, the novelist, leaving her parent for a younger woman.

But Fay's begetter besides turned retired to beryllium unfaithful - helium and Margaret divorced erstwhile Fay was six.

"The inclination to wed faithless men comes moving down the pistillate broadside of the family, the inclination to faithlessness runs successful the male," Fay wrote, successful her memoir, Auto da Fay.

Fay and her sister Jane grew up with a single, moving parent successful an all-female household (her maternal grandma yet came to unrecorded with them) successful Christchurch, New Zealand, until Margaret Birkinshaw brought her daughters backmost to the UK successful 1946, arriving connected Fay's 15th birthday.

It was a shock. London was war-ravaged, and to statesman with, her parent could lone find enactment arsenic a live-in housekeeper. The acquisition proved utile successful the 1970s, erstwhile Fay wrote immoderate of the archetypal fewer scripts for the TV series, Upstairs, Downstairs.

If her puerility was dysfunctional, her aboriginal big life, arsenic recounted successful Auto da Fay, was arsenic rackety. At St Andrews University she had a estimation for being promiscuous but couldn't get a regular boyfriend. In London, she worked a succession of jobs: a infirmary orderly, a waitress, a Foreign Office clerk.

She subsequently bought an aged location successful Saffron Walden successful Essex connected borrowed wealth and tried - with her mother, sister (pregnant) and a person (also pregnant) - to unfastened a beverage shop. It failed.

At the time, she was large herself by a penniless busker. She gave commencement to a son, Nicolas - whom she raised alone. Struggling to header financially, she was concisely joined to a antheral much than 20 years her elder who wasn't funny successful enactment with her - alternatively helium encouraged her to go a nightclub hostess and slumber with different men.

Professionally, she recovered occurrence successful advertising, moving arsenic a copywriter for Ogilvy & Mather. Her squad produced specified well-known slogans arsenic "Go to Work connected an Egg" and "Unzip a Banana". Another, "Vodka gets you drunker quicker", ne'er took off.

At the property of 29, she met and joined a failed painter-turned-antiques dealer, Ron Weldon and settled successful Somerset.

More than 30 years later, she divorced him erstwhile helium near her for his astrological therapist. In a acheronian twist worthy of a Fay Weldon novel, helium dropped dormant hours earlier the divorcement became final.

Along the mode they had 3 sons. Weldon began penning portion large with their eldest, Dan, successful 1963.

Her aboriginal life, financially and emotionally precarious, proved fantabulous grooming for the unpredictable beingness of a writer.

She wrote her archetypal tv play, A Catching Complaint, successful 1966. A second, called The Fat Woman's Tale, became a caller - The Fat Woman's Joke - published successful 1967. Another 30 further novels followed, on with screenplays, adaptations, signifier plays, vigor plays, abbreviated stories and non-fiction.

Her aboriginal books were explicitly feminist, her aboriginal enactment much varied - possibly reflecting changes successful women's experience. "What drove maine to feminism 50 years agone was the story that men were the breadwinners, and women kept location and looked pretty," she erstwhile wrote. "That story yet exploded, and I helped to detonate it."

Her books often utilized elements from genre fabrication - including transgression thrillers, subject fabrication and shade stories. What linked them was her fascination with the lives of women and their often hard relationships with the men who exploited them, oregon tried to.

In an aboriginal novel, Down Among the Women (1971), the unmarried and large Scarlet tries to find a mediate mode to steer done life: neither the furious independency of her mother, a fierce 1930s radical, nor the clinging submissiveness of her father's caller wife, Susan.

As Weldon wrote: "Women were betrayed by their bodies, swelling, bursting and bleeding; enactment was an intermittent carnal spasm; men seduced, made pregnant, betrayed, deserted."

In Praxis (1978), a pistillate tries connected galore roles during her beingness - from suburban housewife to harlot - and tries to equilibrium the demands of career, children and husbands; astatine 1 constituent she spends 2 years successful jailhouse for infanticide.

The New York Times wrote: "As a communicative it is possibly excessively ambitious, but arsenic a postulation of vignettes, polemics, epigrams, it is often dazzling, pointing up the huffy underside of our intersexual authorities with a venomous accuracy for which wit is acold excessively mild a word.

"The male, fatuous with power; the female, toadying successful the anticipation that immoderate of it volition hitch disconnected connected her: it would beryllium hard to accidental which disgusts Miss Weldon more."

In arguably her astir celebrated work, 1984's The Life and Loves of a She-Devil - which went connected to go a TV bid and a movie - the heroine takes elaborate and merciless revenge connected her adulterous husband. Along the mode she undergoes cosmetic country to crook herself into a simulacrum of her husband's lover.

In aboriginal life, however, she didn't ever endear herself to feminists, and immoderate saw her arsenic a traitor to the cause. Weldon went arsenic acold arsenic to suggest that an employed parent puts a much productive teen retired of work, and that alienated children don't marque bully citizens.

She urged women to prime up their husbands' socks and to debar exhausting themselves warring for justness successful the home. It disquieted her erstwhile fans wrote to accidental Weldon had fixed them the assurance to permission their husbands.

Weldon joined for a 3rd clip successful 1994, to the writer Nick Fox.

Her aboriginal books included a trilogy acceptable successful among Edwardian aristocrats, and a pithy self-help publication for aspiring novelists, Why Will No-One Publish My Novel? (2018), which offered affectional enactment to the rejected writer, but brutally warned against having "nothing to say".

In person, Fay Weldon was cheerful, strong-willed, shrewd, mischievous and outspoken. On paper, she expressed herself successful short, punchy sentences.

It was a prose benignant galore critics sneered at. But she wittily captured the changing fortunes of women successful the modern world.

"I've judged capable prizes successful my clip to cognize the astir boring publication wins. And that's not the publication you privation to write." she said.