Writer Fay Weldon dies aged 91

Fay Weldon, who chronicled the ups and downs of British life in novels, TV dramas, plays and short fiction for more than five decades has died aged 91, her son Dan Weldon has confirmed.

Weldon charted lives shaped by class and the sexual revolution in more than 30 novels including The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, Splitting and the Booker prize-shortlisted Praxis. The sharp dialogue, scathing wit and satirical energy of her fiction were forged in the world of stage and television, where her screenwriting credits included ITV’s Upstairs Downstairs and an adaptation of Pride and Prejudice for the BBC.

The writer Jenny Colgan has tweeted about the news: Weldon was “FORMIDABLE and FIERCE and WONDERFUL and very nice to me and SPLENDID”, she said.

Born in a Worcestershire village in 1931, Weldon spent her early years in New Zealand, where her father was a doctor. At the end of the second world war, she returned to England with her mother, and studied at St Andrews before becoming pregnant and marrying Ronald Bateman, a man 25 years her senior. In her 2002 autobiography, Auto da Fay, Weldon described how Bateman wasn’t interested in sex and encouraged her to work as a hostess in a Soho nightclub. After breaking up with Bateman, Weldon worked as an advertising copywriter, coming up with the slogan “Go to work on an egg”, and married the jazz trumpeter Ronald Weldon.

She began writing scripts for radio and television, contributing to series such as ITV’s Armchair Theatre and BBC’s Wednesday Play. An ITV drama, The Fat Woman’s Joke, would become her first novel, published in 1967. Esther Sussman despairs of her husband’s enthusiasm for dieting and retreats to a basement in Earl’s Court where she reads science fiction, watches television and eats. There she receives visits from a friend, her son, her husband and his secretary, and inveighs against married life. The Observer saluted the firm plotting of this “auspicious debut” and a style that is “a powerful instrument of comic derision”, judging that Weldon possessed “the kind of talent that can do without fair-mindedness and social conscience” and was “a voice one will have no difficulty in remembering”.

With four more novels appearing over the following decade, as well as a series of plays for stage and screen, there was little chance that a voice as caustic and energetic as Weldon’s would be forgotten. Her sixth novel, Praxis, tells the story of a woman who plays a succession of roles – drudge, prostitute, wife, mother, copywriter and feminist leader – and finds herself committing adultery, incest and infanticide. This “convincing and moving … adventure in feminism”, published in 1978, was her “best novel to date”, according to the Guardian, and earned Weldon her only appearance on the Booker prize shortlist.

Fay Weldon photographed at her home in Dorset. Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Observer

Weldon’s best-known novel, The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, was published five years later, in 1983. Clumsy, “ugly” suburban housewife Ruth Patchett discovers her husband is leaving her, and decides to upend her world. “What I want is power over the hearts and pockets of men,” Ruth declares, before burning down her house, ruining her husband’s career and driving his lover to desperation through repeatedly transforming herself. The Observer called it Weldon’s “nastiest novel so far … the most mutilating kind of satire, whose only ‘point’ is to bring you up against the bars of your cage”. The BBC adapted it for television in 1986, with a Hollywood version starring Meryl Streep and Roseanne Barr appearing three years later.

A mischievous and provocative figure, Weldon was never afraid to ignite a media storm, suggesting once that only 60% of what she told journalists was true. But declarations that rape “actually isn’t the worst thing that can happen to a woman”, or that “women diminish men in the way men used to diminish women” left some feminists accusing her of betrayal – an accusation she brushed aside, suggesting she was really “the one, the only feminist there is and the others are all out of step”.

Weldon maintained she was philosophical about her comparative lack of literary awards. “My sentences are too short,” she told the Guardian in 2009, “and if you want to win prizes, and be taken seriously as a literary writer, you have to take out all the jokes.” As for her personal life, she claimed she was “always good with relationships, they just weren’t very good with me. But I don’t regret anything,” she added, “because it’s all good copy.”