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For girls — some of them middle-aged — who have not lived in this messy world, the book offers only irony and scorn, the scorn of the combat veteran for the rear-echelon soldier. Yet Author Weldon feels a kind of terror in the presence of the scarcely helpless woman of the future, as projected by Scarlet's daughter Byzantia. Condescending to her mother's generation, Byzantia sees men as the symptom "of a fearful disease from which you all suffered" With Byzantia, "nothing is hidden, nothing is feared. " Everything is discussed — that is, "rendered harmless" — and then "simply forgotten."
Cool, cool Byzantia, Mrs. Weldon decides, "is a destroyer" in a generation created to destroy forever a certain sort of female image. A bit melodramatic, even scifi, perhaps. Yet beside Fay Weldon, all the Germaine Greers, all the Kate Milletts, all the non-fictionists of Women's Liberation pale into abstract theory.
— Melvin Maddocks
"I get rid of all my unpleasantness — my vision of reality, that is — in my writing. That lets me live in the myth of a cozy and pleasant everyday existence."
As she says that, Fay Weldon's smile couldn't be pleasanter. A tall, tousled blonde with ample, maternal proportions, she seems the picture, if not the caricature, of a busy 41-year-old wife. Her children are aged 18, nine and two, and she is immersed in the chores and joys of middle-class domesticity.
The Weldon manner, however, is basically deceptive and only partly because Housewife Weldon is also a novelist and a well-known TV writer. The author, for example, has supreme literary confidence. Not a whit daunted by the inevitable comparison between her novel and Mary McCarthy's The Group, she believes Down Among the Women is superior. "Mary McCarthy's girl problems seem to be unrelated to the boring problems of ordinary women," she says. "What I write seems to be the common experience, rooted in children-washing-shopping-cancer-death and all the rest of the messy things women are caught up in. I like women, and I am aware of their wasted potential." Her aim is to help recondition women so that they no longer "believe that if they don't get married it's a dreadful moral sin."
Chauvinist. For years Fay Weldon was anything but confident. She is a doctor's daughter who was brought up in New Zealand. After her parents' divorce, her mother brought her back to England and a period of "hardship and deprivation." She won a scholarship to St. Andrews University, where, oddly enough, she read economics while failing English exams, graduating to a job in advertising and eventual psychoanalysis. "Scarlet is a portrait of me when I was younger," she readily confesses, "a mess—oh yes, totally and completely. I messed up my life hopelessly until I met my husband." He is a London antique dealer named Ronald Weldon, whom she happily describes as a male chauvinist. "I'm very devoted to him, and I couldn't actually live with any other kind," she explains. "I'm a masochist that way."