Down among the women. What a place to be! In the Fifties, women were looked after by nice, breadwinning men: or so went the myth. Eighteen-year-old unmarried mother Scarlet, a lost child recovering from her first abortion, looks at the world with her friends and begins to see the truth. An icily funny account of a dawning feminist sensibility in a world where the romantic ideal of love and domesticity ruled.

The local river has burst its banks, causing flooding in Cynthia's and Step's antiques business. Cynthia, immobile with her leg in plaster, can only comment on the rising tide to her husband and daughter Angela as they endeavour to save the stock by carrying it upstairs. Their elder daughter, high-flying city exec Jane, and her partner, Trevor, arrive to help, with Jane intent on organizing everyone. But the animosity between the sisters is apparent and a startling announcement by Angela opens up another flood - this time of family secrets!3 women, 2 men

A witty, astutely observed study of sexual politics in contemporary society which centres on an all-female reading group. Oriole wants to study contemporary authors, while Anne prefers well-known classics. Pondering the relative merits, the women reveal themselves, their personalities echoing the literary heroines. But not everyone is there for literature. Nefarious designs are uncovered and tensions rise to a dramatic climax.5 women, 2 men

Trendy magazine Femina offers two contrasting wives - country-bumpkin Anne and sophisticate Cat - GBP1000 to swap places for a week to compare lifestyles. Anne goes to London to run the chic apartment of Cat's advertising executive husband, while Cat journeys to deepest Devon to cook, clean and care for gentle, sexually-repressed, shopkeeper Derek. Violent snowstorms mean that Cat and Derek are cut off, and when the snow ploughs eventually arrive the life-swap has become a wife-swap.3 women, 2 men

This is a study of the shifting inter-relationships between three young couples, following the developments with sympathy and a certain ironic humour, through a span of twenty-five years.3 women, 3 men

An entertainment on marriage by George Melly, Alan Ayckbourn, James Saunders, Harold Pinter, Alun Owen, Fay Weldon, David Campton, Lyndon Brook and John Bowen.1 woman, 1 man or flexible casting

In Fay Weldon's 1983 classic, The Life and Loves of a She Devil, women fought men for power and won. But in 2017, the fight continues on a new front... Ruth Patchett, the original She Devil, is eighty-four and keen to retire. She has worked hard to make the world as she wants it: women triumphant, men submissive. Now she is tired. Her business is done. The mantle of power and influence is up for grabs. Who can take up the role? Valerie Valeria, hot-shot millennial and Ruth's PA, is ready and eager to inherit...

Fay Weldon, one of England's best-selling and most celebrated authors, looks back on her life as wife, lover, playwright, novelist, feminist, antifeminist, and bon vivant in this funny and engaging memoir. She writes brilliantly about her upbringing in New Zealand, as young and poor girl in London, as an unmarried mother, wife, lover, playwright, novelist, feminist, anti-feminist, and winer-and-diner: there is little ground she's failed to cover.
Brought up among women-her intrepid mother, grandmother, and sister-Weldon found men a mystery until the swinging-sixties London introduced her to the indecent, the hopeless, and the golden-footed. A central figure among the Bohemian writers and artists of the sixties, she has maintained this unique position through four turbulent decades. An icon to many, a thorn in the flesh to others, she has never failed to excite, madden, or interest.
Born Franklin Birkinshaw in Barnt Green, Birmingham, in 1931, most of Weldon's childhood was spent in New Zealand. Her glamorous father, a philandering doctor, played only a minor role as was generally absent. Fay's intrepid mother and bohemian grandmother raised her along with her sister, Jane. Weldon's family, it turns out, has an impressive literary pedigree; her grandfather, Edgar, Uncle Selwyn and, for a brief while, her mother were all novelists. Arriving in London from New Zealand, just after the Second World War, her mother kept the brood together by working as a servant in a grand house-the experience of living below stairs later helped Weldon to script the television drama Upstairs, Downstairs.
After graduating from St. Andrews University, Weldon worked in the Foreign Office until becoming pregnant. Defying the conventions of the times, she remained a single parent. She struggled, living in poverty in post-war London made all the more grinding since she was trying to maintain respectability. Following a stint at the Daily Mirror, she drifted into advertising before desperately entering into a crushingly awful marriage of financial (in)convenience-a marriage so dreadful she writes of it in the third person as if writing about characters in a novel. With cool, unwavering honesty she details the truly crushing experience of being hitched to a celibate, Masonic headmaster who encouraged her to work in a seedy West End nightclub. She escapes eventually, and finds true love at thirty after meeting Ron Weldon at a party. When this union, too, comes to an end, Fay's packed enough experience into her life to begin her career as a writer. She develops into a bohemian intellectual, and works alongside poets such as Edwin Brock, David Wevill and Peter Porter, pens winning advertising slogans, and truly begins writing seriously. Fay closes her riveting memoir as she drops what will be her first success, a television play, into a Regents Park mailbox on her way to the hospital to give birth. The play will be the first of many triumphs for a writer whose provocative oeuvre has never failed to excite, madden, or interest.

Here in one volume are the texts of two of the greatest--and most controversial--epic poems in English literature, each a profound exploration of the moral problems of God's justice. Includes notes by Ricks and a new Afterword by Weldon. Revised reissue.

"Mantrapped" is a dazzling new work that continues Fay Weldon's critically acclaimed memoir, Auto da Fay, and tells the story of a woman down on her luck. Trisha is forty-four and at the end of her rope: creditors are coming and boyfriends have long left. Then, one day, on the stairs above her local dry cleaner, she bumps into the dashing Peter Watson, an editor for the local newspaper. After brushing past each other, they mysteriously and instantly swap souls. Peter looks down to see himself housed in Trisha's much curvier form, and Trisha discovers she's newly equipped with hairy legs and a six-pack. Mixing humor, imagination and insight, "Mantrapped" proves that Weldon is still the best at writing about the sexes.

Smart, sexy, and infinitely charming, Rhode Island Blues tells the story of Sophia Moore, a loveless and guarded thirty-four-year-old film editor in London who believes that her only living relative is her stormy and wild grandmother Felicity. Troubled by her mother's long-ago suicide and her father's abandonment, Sophia overworks, incessantly contemplates her past, and continues a flat sexual affair with the famous director of her latest film. But when she travels to Rhode Island to help Felicity settle into a retirement center, she begins to unravel mysteries about her family history while Felicity learns to gamble, falls in love, and uncovers the truth about the center's evil nurse Dawn. A hilarious tale of family secrets, nursing-home high jinks, and late-life love, Rhode Island Blues is Fay Weldon at her witty best. ."..Fay Weldon transports her wry wit, trenchant observational powers, and sublimely snappy prose to this side of the Atlantic...." -- Elle "Wry and witty, Weldon smartly skewers retirement homes, the film industry, and the deceptive elasticity of family ties." -- Entertainment Weekly "Energetic.... Weldon] possesses a wry wisdom about mating behavior." -- The New York Times Book Review "Smart and funny, Weldon's boldly plotted and finely crafted tale deftly satirizes our infinite capacity for self-delusion." -- Booklist

Once again the acclaimed British author of Rhode Island Blues and Big Girls Don't Cry draws us into an unmistakably wild, rollicking tale full of her trademark satirical wit and sharp observation. Grace McNab Salt is the recently divorced wife of the millionaire Barley Salt, who has married Doris Dubois, the sexy, young host of TV's Artsworld Extra. The novel opens with Grace emerging from jail where she was sent for trying to run Doris over with her Jaguar in a supermarket parking lot in an act of revenge. All three attend a London charity ball, and in typical Weldon fashion the meeting turns everyone's lives upside down. Weldon's world is one of relationships: torrid affairs, lovers' spite, and revenge. Full of clever women, breathless romance, insistent desires, and even a dose of the supernatural, The Bulgari Connection is a boisterously witty and stylish novel. The publication of The Bulgari Connection created a whirl of controversy when a front-page New York Times article revealed that Weldon received an undisclosed sum of money from the famous Italian jeweler for a prominent place in her novel. The debate about the legitimacy of commercially sponsored literature has been heating up ever since.

This latest offering from critically acclaimed author Fay Weldon is a darkly comic romp through the minefields of friendship and feminism. On a balmy evening in 1971, five women meet in a cramped living room in the suburbs of London. Tired of their husbands and their own unsatisfying lives, they form the aptly named Medusa, a book publishing house founded on the principle of "getting even." With wry and savvy humor, Weldon weaves us through twenty years of these women's lives, as good intentions fall by the wayside and the hazards of their new politics, sex, and infidelity take their toll.

Via 20 madcap tales, Fay Weldon takes readers into a world peopled with therapists who blithely destroy marriages and family ties, husbands and lovers whose greatest cruelty is their indifference, and clever women navigating the perils of domesticity. Her wicked humor and seasoned wisdom are as evident here as always--and tempered by great compassion for the foibles of the human heart.

A sharp and funny portrait of divorce. Splitting captures brilliantly the chaotic rhythms of a woman in crisis as it chronicles Angelica's disintegration into a handful of a "perforated" personalities. No one writes with shrewder insight about women and that ambiguous and overriding presence in their lives-men -- than Fay Weldon. This is a journey rich with her wit, wisdom, and very original narrative power. "It's always a pleasure to read a seasoned novelist in peak form; Weldon is in complete control of her material here, effortlessly shifting between laughter and tears." -- Booklist; "Splitting is a vintage Weldon brew: sharp, effervescent, easily consumed and just the sort that leaves you ready for another round." -- The Hartford Courant; "A darkly comic portrait of one woman's shattering response to divorce: the latest from an author rightly celebrated for writing witty cautionary tales about the contemporary sexual jungle." -- Kirkus Reviews.

From the hilarious opening to the satisfying final conflagration, Fay Weldon's Worst Fears is a taut, scathing revelation of the nature of marital intimacy. When Alexandra returns from her stint on the London stage to find her husband mysteriously dead of a heart attack and her female friends ominously invested in smoothing out all the complications of the tragedy, she begins to be suspicious. At first she attributes this to grief, then to paranoia. But she soon finds herself starting to crack, crank-calling her friends' psychiatrist, attacking people with kitchen chairs and breaking into their houses, searching furiously for evidence to confirm her husband's rampant adultery and her own worst fears. "A snappy whodunit of the heart....one of Weldon's best novels yet." -- The New York Times Book Review; "With a dash of murder mystery and a wink at Isben's grim tales of ruined marriages, this splendid and spiteful novel shows Fay Weldon to be in as fine form as ever." -- The Philadelphia Inquirer; "A hundred years hence, if people can still read, Weldon's books will likely have the unblunted edge of Jane Austen, an unsentimental Baedeker guide to sexual manners in an ill-mannered age. Fay Weldon breaks taboos like tape at a marathon, and she hasn't stopped running yet." -- Los Angeles Times.

'She's a Queen of Words' CAITLIN MORAN. 'One of the great lionesses of modern English literature' HARPER'S BAZAAR. 'Readable, articulate and fascinating' THE SCOTSMAN. 'Outrageously funny' DAILY EXPRESS. 'Sharp, witty, incisive' THE TIMES. 'Wise, knowing, forthright' INDEPENDENT. Reviewers have been describing Fay Weldon's inimitable voice for years. Now, here is Fay Weldon in her own words. Choosing and and introducing twenty-one of her favourite short stories written throughout her fifty year career as one of Britain's foremost novelists. Included as a bonus is a new novella, The Ted Dreams, a ghost story for the age of cyber culture, big pharma, and surveillance.

Fay Weldon lets her incisive wit loose on a hot issue facing many modern families--child care, and what can happen when that involves having a nanny under your roof. She May Not Leave confirms, "when she's on form there's simply no touching Fay Weldon as a writer" (The Observer). Hattie and Martyn are the proud parents of newborn Kitty; both are in their early thirties, smart, handsome, and, for reasons of liberal principle, not married but partnered. All seems fine at first--healthy baby, happy couple--but when they have to decide who'll look after little Kitty, things get complicated. Hattie's dying to get back to work but Martyn fears employing foreign help might hurt his leftist political aspirations. Martyn capitulates when Agnieska arrives--a Polish nanny who happens to be both domestic goddess and first-rate belly dancer, the maker of a mean cup of cocoa who's also educated in early childhood development. Having her in the house makes life livable again for the young couple, so when problems arise with her immigration papers Martyn and Hattie will do anything to keep her in the country. But will their decision to have Martyn marry her be the trouble-free solution they envision?

You've written a book, triumphantly typed 'The End', but now, it seems, no-one wants to publish it. What do you do next?

Author of over thirty novels, stories and screenplays, and tutor on the prestigious creative writing course at Bath Spa, Fay Weldon has a lifetime of wisdom to impart on the art of writing.

Why Will No-One Publish My Novel? will delight and amuse, but it isn't just another how-to-write handbook: it shows you how not to write if you want to get published.

'Weaves literary lore with Weldon's considerable experience as a successful writer' Evening Standard.

'Contains lots of interesting advice' Daily Mail.

'Tips and emotional support for the would-be novelist' Sunday Times.

How To Be a Writer is a comprehensive guide to the career of writing from experienced writer and creative writing tutor Sally O'Reilly. The book will cover questions such as: If you want to be a writer, should you invest in a creative writing course? If so, which one? Are writing groups a good thing? What grants, awards and prizes are available to the aspiring writer? How should you plan your career in the long term? It will also feature an introduction from Fay Weldon - 'Why I wish I'd read this book when I was 25' - and will include comments and case studies from other established authors, agents and industry experts. How To Be a Writer will include everything that a writer needs to know about running their own career, from choosing an agent to cafe scribbling, and from filing a tax return to flirting with the literati and will be an essential reference book for any author who takes their work seriously.

'A savage, sadistic even, but beautifully and compellingly written satire' Sunday Express Ruth Patchett never thought of herself as particularly devilish. 'The fun grows steadily blacker and wilder' Guardian Rather the opposite in fact - simply a tall, not terribly attractive woman living a quiet life as a wife and mother in a respectable suburb. But when she discovers that her husband is having a passionate affair with the lovely romantic novelist Mary Fisher, she is so seized by envy that she becomes truly diabolic. Within weeks she has burnt down the family home, collected the insurance, made love to the local drunk and embarked on a course of destruction and revenge. 'A tour de force: a macabre, fast-moving moral fable' The Times A blackly comic satire of the war of the sexes, The Life and Loves of a She-Devil is the fantasy of the wronged woman made real.

Madeleine wants revenge: Madeleine wants to be remembered: Madeleine wants love. Who doesn?t? Madeleine is ex-wife of and chief persecutor to Jarvis, the architect. Why not? She hates him. Hilary is their daughter, growing fatter and lumpier every day under Madeleine?s triumphant care, witness to the wrongs her mother suffered.

For Jarvis has a clean new life with a clean new wife, Lily, and a nice new baby, Jonathan. The furniture is polished and there is orange juice for breakfast. Jarvis is content, or thinks he is, fending off Madeleine?s forays as best he can.

Jarvis has a part-time secretary , too, Margot, now the doctor?s wife, unremembered from the days of her youth. Margot, unacknowledged wife and mother, accepting, tending, nurturing his children and her own, complaisant in her lot.

Until Madeleine, hurling out her dark reproaches from the other side of violent death, uncovers new familial links in the disruption she creates.

Fay Weldon is renowned for her biting humor and devilish prose. In her latest novel, The Spa, Weldon offers a glimpse of the despairs and dalliances of a set of high-powered women who have burned paths through--and sometimes been burned by--their worlds and the men in them. It is the week between Christmas and New Year's and ten high-achieving ladies are gathered at the expensive Castle Spa seeking to rejuvenate themselves with Botox, aromatherapy, and all-around pampering. They lounge in the Jacuzzi, sipping champagne, and telling each other the story of their lives, starting with the trophy wife's tale of her spell in a Greek prison; the brain surgeon's tale of twins and mistaken identity; the judge's tale of a sex change that allowed him to experience the pleasures of the bedroom from both male and female perspectives. The manicurist, the public speaker, the journalist, the company director, the ex-vicar's wife, and the screenwriter all share their stories, ending with the stepmother's tale, a reversal of Cinderella's fate, with the stepmother as the victim. Sparkling, witty, always sharp-tongued, and occasionally libidinous, The Spa is a darkly funny sketch of a group of women who, despite prejudice, imprisonment, domestic catastrophes, and romantic debacles, have risen to the top of their respective worlds.

Alice is an eighteen-year-old student and aspiring novelist with green spiky hair, a child of the modern age who recoils at the idea of reading Jane Austen. In a sequence of letters reminiscent of Jane Austen's to her own neice, 'aunt' Fay examines the rewards of such study. Not only is her correspondence a revealing tribute to a great writer - it is also an original and rewarding exploration of the craft of fiction itself.

Benoite Groult's most pioneering and best-loved work follows the passionate relationship between a pair of mismatched lovers - a Parisian intellectual and a Breton fisherman - brought together by lust. Through love-letters and exotic encounters around the world, their life-long affair evolves, liberating them from the restrictions and disappointments of everyday life. Thirty years after its initial appearance, this beautifully written erotic evergreen feels as fresh as ever with its unconventional, lighthearted, and carefree picture of female sexuality.