Fay Weldon, Feminism, and British Culture

Fay Weldon, Feminism, and British Culture: Challenging Cultural and Literary Conventions offers a critical analysis of British author Fay Weldon’s major novels from 1967 to the present and addresses how Weldon’s fiction engages with controversial moral, social, and political issues. This book provides an in-depth examination of the relationship between Weldon’s fiction and the contemporary feminist, cultural, and literary movements in Britain. Representative works from each decade speak to the multiple controversies and challenges to convention in which Weldon and her books played key roles. Drawing on Weldon’s personal history, fiction, and nonfiction as well as on historical, sociological, and literary documents, this book builds a cultural framework in which to understand Weldon’s work and the critical response to it. It shows that although Weldon’s battleground may change with the times, her ability and desire to provoke controversy remain constant as she continues to question and upset social, literary, and cultural conventions.

In a study of impressive scope and insight, Mara Reisman brings together cultural history and literary analysis. She does the almost-impossible, taking the reader through over fifty years of Weldon's writing, exploring its diversity, while maintaining a clear line of argument., In the first comprehensive overview of Weldon’s major novels from the Sixties to the new millennium, Mara Reisman examines the challenges posed and controversies ignited by one of Britain’s most entertaining, inventive and provocative writers.  This book offers an important and valuable account of Weldon’s relationship to gender and sexual politics, social concerns and literary culture over six decades., Not only will Mara Reisman’s engaging, comprehensive and savvy exploration of Fay Weldon’s works become the definitive commentary on Weldon--it will also be recognized by scholars and critics as a useful, erudite and lively exposition of sex, class, humor, feminism and the art of publishing over the last half-century. “One must be careful with words,” writes Weldon, and Reisman’s book illustrates the axiom.

Mara E. Reisman is associate professor of British literature and women's literature at Northern Arizona University.