Search Results

“... Geoffrey​ thought perhaps Tania should see a psychotherapist. She was having nightmares, the substance of which eluded her but the attendant feeling – tone (as she learned to call it) – was clear enough. Terror. That was in 1968, and their joint income was low. Geoffrey was studying sociology at the London School of Economics, when he wasn’t at the barricades or fomenting revolution, and Tania, who already had her degree, was working for a market research firm in a rather humble capacity ...”

“... There is an unusual emphasis on ghosts in Fay Weldon’s autobiography. Early on, angels appear to her mother in the local park; a woman in white sits on the six-year-old Weldon’s bed; and ghosts unaccountably darken the rooms at her New Zealand high school (a sort of advance haunting, she now thinks, by the woman who was to be killed nearby in the murder dramatised in the film Heavenly Creatures ...”

“... a white blouse, or white stockings, or a white shirt, quite separately. The ghostly narrator of Fay Weldon’s novella The Rules of Life pleads for painstaking attention to the laundry. She ventriloquises the instructions on clothes labels, on detergent packages, and in the handbook that comes with the washing-machine, lacing her lessons with ...”

“... Whatever the women in these Weldon and Shuttle novels achieve, it is not through effort or desperation so much as by passive submission. Women’s minds and bodies are the scene of all the action, but apparently no more than the scene; and though uninhibited freedom in this area is a sign of emancipation in modern women’s writing, I don’t know that the effect and the message in these two books will get a welcome in radical circles ...”

“... Jenefer Shute’s Life-Size comes garnished with a quote from Fay Weldon, in which enthusiasm has got the better of taste: ‘Terrific! I devoured it at a sitting.’ ‘Devour’ is not a word one would choose to apply to a novel about the suppression of appetites, however jocularly. This book is full of rage and disgust ...”

“... Lane? Original thought is not a requirement. And even if you shift the period back a few years, as Fay Weldon has done in Habits of the House (she does at least have a more practised writing and plotting hand than either Fellowes or Osborne), there is still the great tottering pile, inheritance and marriage problems, the chorus of wise and anxious ...”

“... beneath the skin – an unsettling practice, and one altogether alien to the Starkadder spirit. Fay Weldon’s tone, in her new collection of stories, is as grimly chatty as ever: ‘Well now, friends, let’s have a little light relief. Let me tell you the story of what happened to Esther and Alan in the 24th year of their marriage.’ So opens ...”

“... Bargate’s fiction is interestingly poised at the threshold of the last stage. The title story in Fay Weldon’s collection, Watching Me, Watching You, is about a haunting. A not very potent ghost occupies a 130-year-old house in an area of Bristol recently gentrified. He entered on the shoulders of a luckless Victorian housemaid, who later hanged ...”

“... and sustained. But it is not at this level that the gravity of the book is made manifest. Mrs Weldon has in the past been a devastating but partial protagonist in the familiar argument of man’s inhumanity to woman. Here she breaks free of her own propaganda, and in one of the most lyrical passages written by a woman for many years, she acknowledges the ...”

“... allowed to preen himself at leisure. Next to him, the two British panellists – Lord Archer and Fay Weldon – seemed dwarfishly over-anxious to make points: Archer, of course, trumpeting the Tory Party line, and Weldon semi-weeping for Old Labour. ‘Where does an old radical like you go?’ Paxman asked ...”

“... alone an auto da fe. It was autos da fe, if you recall, that were the problem in the first place. Fay Weldon has no urgent quarrel with the ‘free speech first’ position. The difficulty with her ‘CounterBlast’ is that it, too, imports a lot of extraneous matter into the argument, does so before it has made up its mind, and thus fails to arrive at ...”

“... to the female presence in the centre of the book, though both would have balked at saying, as Fay Weldon has done, that being women made them unable to understand or feel sympathy with a man. The honesty of that remark shows just how far, in the post-Drabble-Byatt novel, the process has gone. Elizabeth Bowen or Elizabeth Taylor ignored, in their ...”

“... shaving from his workshop floor is gratefully scooped up. Other heavyweights in the collection are Fay Weldon and Francis Stuart. Weldon’s piece is an ironic unhappily-ever-after study of contemporary marriage, given in her familiar a-man-was-born-he-lived-and-he-died manner. Stuart’s ‘The Water Garden’ is a ...”

“... drive’. As to the places Haffenden would least like to move into, these are occupied by Fay Weldon (‘a small modernised terrace house in Kentish Town’) and Martin Amis (‘a flat in a solid and gabled Victorian edifice ... it looks as if it has just been burgled’). The wisest of all interviewees, though, turns out to be David ...”

“... version of the Koran expecting to be shocked by its exotic barbarism. There have been many, like Fay Weldon at the time of the Rushdie affair, who have read an English translation and are just as shocked as they expected to be. Because the Koran is not a free-standing text, a great deal of glossing and contextual knowledge is required, and this is as ...”