Fay Weldon CBE, FRSL was an English author, essayist, and playwright. Over the course of her 55-year writing career, she published 31 novels, including Puffball, The Cloning of Joanna May, Wicked Women 1995) and The Bulgari Connection (2000), but was most well-known as the writer of The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1983) which was televised by the BBC in 1986.
When was Fay Weldon born?
Fay Weldon, original name Franklin Birkinshaw was born on September 22, 1931, at Alvechurch, Worcestershire, England, and died January 4, 2023, in Northampton, Northamptonshire).
Where was Fay Weldon born?
Weldon was born Franklin Birkinshaw to a literary family in Birmingham, England, on 22 September 1931. Her maternal grandfather, Edgar Jepson (1863–1938), her uncle Selwyn Jepson and her mother Margaret Jepson wrote novels (the latter sometimes under the nom de plume Pearl Bellairs, from the name of a character in Aldous Huxley’s short story “Farcical History of Richard Greenow”).
In September 1946, when she was 15, Weldon returned to England with her mother and sister. She recalled: “I was a literary groupie from the antipodes. Not that I had any intention of being a writer at the time – too much like hard work.
All I wanted was to get married and have babies.” She did not see her father again before his death in 1949.