Fay Weldon. In Memoriam

Via The Stage or The Guardian we report the death of the English author, essayist and playwright Fay Weldon CBE (1931 – 2023)

Picture Source: Open Media Ltd., CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Though more popularly known as a prolific novelist, Fay Weldon began her writing career in television as part of an emerging generation of writers that included Dennis Potter, Simon Gray and Michael Frayn.

Early theatre success included the multi-authored “entertainment on marriage” play  Mixed Doubles, alongside the likes of Alan Ayckbourn and Harold Pinter at London’s Comedy Theatre in 1969.

By then, she had written her first television play, A Catching Complaint (1966), and published her first novel, The Fat Woman’s Joke (1967).

More than 20 stage works followed, including original work and adaptations of Jane Eyre (Birmingham Rep, 1986), A Doll’s House (Oxford Stage, 1988), Tess of the d’Urbervilles (West Yorkshire Playhouse, 1992) and Madame Bovary (Lyric Hammersmith, 2003).

She also wrote (with director Robin Midgley) the book for Petula Clark’s musical Someone Like You at the Cambridge Arts Theatre in 1989, which toured before coming into London’s Strand Theatre in 1990, its run cut short by financial difficulties for producer Harold Fielding.

Having written the pilot episode of television series Upstairs, Downstairs in 1971 (for which she won a Writers’ Guild award), Weldon went on to enjoy a prominent profile in small-screen drama writing. (Michael Quinn)

Of course it is her Jane Eyre 1986 (or maybe 1987, or 1988... there is some uncertainty about it, check Patsy Stoneman's Brontë Transformations: The Cultural Dissemination of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights). The play was revised in 1988 in Leeds and produced again in Dublin (1990), Pitlochry (1992), London (1993).

Quoting Patsy Stoneman:

In Fay Weldon's adaptation, self-conscious textuality is combined with a dramatic force which derives, like that of her novels, from a feminist orientation. (...)

The most innovative aspect of the staging, however, only appeared for the Leeds production in 1988, for which Fay Weldon completely rewrote the play after a suggestion from her producer, Helena Kaut-Howson. This version includes not just Jane's story, but also the story of how it was written. (...) Jane's story is certainly that of a woman who feels acutely lonely; but Fay Weldon, rewriting Jane Eyre after the Women's Liberation Movement, sees sisters everywhere, and her play foregrounds this paradox by representing to us an interchangeable girls and women who, in the 'mother-text' are distinct (like Jane Eyre and Adèle), so that we feel that each of the 'dummies' also has the potential to assume life". (Patsy Stoneman's Brontë Transformations, p 203-206, EER (Second Expanded Edition, 2018)