A thought on what fiction gives us

“Fortunately, there is more to life than death. There is for one thing, fiction. A thousand thousand characters to be sent marching out into the world to divert time from its forward gallop to the terrible horizon.”
— Fay Weldon

The British novelist Fay Weldon has long been one of Martha’s favourite writers; she included her work in her Master’s thesis, and books like Down Among the Women (the book from which today’s quote originated) were introduced to me when we started going out.

Weldon was a ferocious writer, publishing not just novels and polemics and non-fiction, but also work for radio and TV. She wrote the pilot episode of Upstairs, Downstairs, in which a young woman named Sarah (a very young Pauline Collins) knocks on the door of a tony London residence and encounters a stern butler named Hudson.

Weldon died in early 2023, at 91. I’d like to get back to reading more of her; I certainly have enjoyed her books in the past. Enough, I should add, to know that Life and Loves of a She-Devil is a good book, and not at all deserving of the 1989 adaptation She-Devil with Meryl Streep and Roseanne Barr. Something went astray there…