The life and loves of Fay Weldon
As the 89-year-old author announces that her marriage is over, Liz Hoggard reflects on an irrepressible woman full of surprises
When I interviewed Fay Weldon CBE last year, she told me frankly that she worried when female fans came up to her at festivals and said: “Thank you for your novel – it gave me the courage to leave my husband.”
“And they look so unhappy,” giggled the veteran feminist who had been married on and off for 60 years.
When I visited her at her north Dorset home, Fay, then 87, was still very much with her third husband Nick Fox, 73, a poet and bookseller who later became her manager.
“My only ambition was always to be married,” she confided. The photographer and I looked at each other nervously.
Why would the brilliant, polemical author of over 40 novels, stories and screenplays, including the classic feminist revenge novel The Life and Loves of a She Devil, claim that being a wife is life’s highest achievement? Throughout the day she often deferred to Fox’s judgment, absent-mindedly buttering a pile of bread while he spoke of the importance of her career.
But Weldon still has the power to shock and wrong-foot us. Yesterday, it was revealed that she had walked out on Fox, at the age of 89. In an email sent to close friends and family, the novelist explained: “I have left my husband and am divorcing him, complaining of coercive control and financial mismanagement. Considering everyone’s troubles this year, my own are mere hiccups. I am now safely with my family.”
It’s clearly a painful story. Fay is believed to have moved out months ago, while recuperating from a stroke, to live with her eldest son, Nic Weldon, in Northamptonshire. No one knows what goes on in other people’s marriages. But it is a bold move to end a 30-year partnership in your ninth decade, especially when your health is frail and your finances are closely entangled.
When The Daily Telegraph contacted Fox for comment, he replied: “Fay is 89 years of age, has suffered a stroke and is, I believe, unwell. For me, this development has been sudden and bewildering. I am presented at a distance with something quite out of character in someone I have known for 40 – and lived with for 30 – years. It is very, very sad.”
Weldon first met Fox when she visited his Somerset bookshop in the early Eighties, and it turned to love when they were both single after a divorce. The age gap – she was 60, he 45 – caused a scandal. Undeterred, Weldon married him in 1994 (they have eight children between them) and they moved to his family house in Dorset.
On that February day when I visited, Fox hovered protectively, part consort, part minder. Weldon told me she hardly ever went out any more “because of my legs” (she has had both knees replaced).
There was no doubting Fox’s adoration – he did all the domestic chores, helped her move around the house, corrected her manuscripts, worried about her appearance. “She looks very beautiful with no make-up,” he told the photographer, sternly.
Was there a slight element of Svengali? It must be hard to be married to an icon, whom everyone wants to meet. And, certainly, when journalists went down to interview Weldon (with the publication of each new book), they all enjoyed the marital double act.
But transcribing the tape later, Fay’s voice seemed notably faint. It perhaps didn’t help that Fox was crashing plates in the kitchen, and during one sensitive conversation about her sex life at university, he started playing the piano loudly in another room. I began to wonder if it would be too demanding for Weldon to appear at more festivals.
Still, it was clear she was a workaholic. She had just written a short play for TV (“I can’t afford to retire and what would one do?”) and she and Nick had been in London watching a run-through of a musical based on The Life and Loves of a She Devil, adapted by actor Nigel Planer. “She goes a bit funny if she’s not writing something,” Fox observed. “It’s like an athlete if they’re not training.”
To his embarrassment, she was brutally honest about money. “I never wanted to write,” she confessed. “But I think the money is the most important thing. I was born into the very poor middle classes, with a single mother.
We got scholarships, but I never had any money. Then I had a baby out of wedlock, but one survived.”
At times, Fox seemed more thrilled about her literary success than she was. “I’m a right-brained, fuzzy person,” she said modestly. “And Nick’s a leftbrained sort of green pencil person, so it works. Between us, we’ve produced a large body of work.”
I found the “we” slightly jarring. Though I can see how easy it might be in a partnership to feel that you’re a co-author. Especially when you’re negotiating the fees and talking to the publishers.
After I left, I asked for another top-up phone chat, slightly worried that there was more of Fox on the tape than Fay. I found myself wishing I’d met my heroine 10 years ago. Her books were so important when I was growing up.
To my relief, she appeared much brighter, with a gently satirical take on her own mortality. She’s had a heart condition since she was young and had two near-death experiences (one when she was 17; one 11 years ago).
And the great thing about secondwave feminists such as Weldon and Germaine Greer is you can never pigeonhole them. Just when you think you know their views on children, or HRT or working women or transgender, they completely change their thinking – and cannily make headlines again. This was the woman who first found success as a top advertising copywriter, famously coining the phrase: “Vodka gets you drunk quicker.”
In many ways, Weldon has reinvented her own story every decade or so. She became a single mother at 22, married for the second time at 32, had her fourth son at 47, and published The Life and Loves of a She Devil, the book that made her famous, at 52.
She even claims that she became a feminist by accident. Brought up at an all-girls’ school with an absent father, she told me she’d never felt pretty or popular, and men were a mystery: “I’d never talked to a man or had a boyfriend until I was sort of trying to lose my virginity.” Her second marriage, to Ron Weldon, a jazz musician-turned-antiques dealer, was passionate but volatile, and produced three sons. She wrote longhand on the stairs while the children were small so she could keep an eye on them and published her first novel The Fat Woman’s Joke in 1968, “which was about the struggle between domesticity and dieting”.
It broke up painfully when Ron left her for his “astrological therapist” in 1992, but, eight hours before the divorce was finalised, he died of a heart attack.
She admitted she and Fox had “terrible rows” about editing her writing, but there are so many benefits to a long marriage, she stressed. You need a witness to your life: “You can get that if you have a group of friends but as you get older, the friends tend to step away or die or get ill.”
Though when I mentioned I was single in my 50s, she seemed a little wistful. “As people get older, it gets more and more difficult to marry,” she told me with a surprisingly beady look. “You become unmarriageable. You really don’t want to change your life for the sake of some bloke.”
It’s upsetting to discover that their relationship may have been privately unhappy or, worse, controlling. They both told me they were attracted to each other because they were “odd” outsiders, who had grown up in households of women.
“Powerful women seem kind of normal to me,” Fox told me. Perhaps the power balance shifted too far, with age and ill health. Fay made it clear at the time she was happy to compromise. When Fox took over our conversation, she smiled at him girlishly, her mind possibly on higher things. It’s the price you need to pay to sustain a long marriage, she seemed to be signalling.
I don’t think she envied my single-girl journey back to an empty flat. Though you should never underestimate a second-wave feminist. At 89, it’s clearly still possible to start a new life.