Most widely known in Britain and abroad as an irreverent novelist usually concerned with women's issues, Fay Weldon has also pursued a wide variety of projects for television, radio, and the stage. The daughter of a novelist, granddaughter of a Vanity Fair editor, and a niece of novelist-screenwriter-radio and television dramatist Selvyn Jepson, Weldon's first published novel in 1967 simply expanded on her 1966 teleplay for The Fat Woman's Tale. The teleplay had been written while Weldon was working as a highly successful copywriter for English print and television advertising; her previous work included the still-remembered "Get to work on an egg" campaign. Weldon remained in advertising until the 1970s, yet she still produced tele­ plays for productions  such  as A Catching  Comp/aim ( 1966) and Poor Cherry ( 1967).

     While Weldon's real progress as a writer has often been traced back to the mid- 1960s, it was in the early 1970s that she began fully to establish both  her name and public voice. Where Weldon fit in British culture was another matter. The Fat Woman's Tale had told a decidedly proto feminist story of a housewife's anger toward her philandering husband, yet Weldon's public espousal of domestic joys and  the  use  of  "Mrs." seemed to mark her as an opponent to the growing British women's rights movement. But as David Frost learned in 1971, Weldon's relation to feminism is not always what it might seem: invited onto Frost's television program to rebut feminist activists, she instead surprised everyone by publicly embracing their complaints. That same year Weldon won the best  series script award from the Writers  Guild  of  Great  Britain for "On Trial," the first episode of Upstairs, Down­ stairs. She wrote only one other episode, and in many ways the series' sober, understated  visual  style  was quite different from the satiric. reflexive, often  fantastic surfaces of much of Weldon's other work, including her sedate, but still barbed, television adaptation  of Pride and Prejudice ( 1980).

     Perhaps it is no coincidence that the imagined recipient of Weldon's letters to Alice: On First Reading Jane Austen (1984) is a punk-haired but literary niece; that juxtaposition of texts and attitudes. together with Weldon's own later televised comments on the (mis)teaching of Austen. led some critics to accuse Weldon of unjustly attacking Austen's work.

     Yet the melodramatic pleasures of both Upstairs, Downstairs and Pride and Prejudice run through nearly all of Weldon's work and inform her understanding of gender. She not only won a prestigious Booker Prize nomination for Praxis (1978) but also chaired the prize's 1983 panel. Yet Weldon has never divorced her "serious" literary work from her own enjoyment of what she calls "that whole women's magazine area, the communality of women's interests, and the sharing of the latest eye-shadow." With such an attitude, Weldon penned the polemical prison docu­ drama Life for Christine (1980), polished the script for Joan Collins's Sins miniseries (1985), and turned a critical eye toward pastoral life in The Heart of the Country ( 1987).

     Despite her willingness to adapt the work of others, Weldon has been protective of the rights to her own work. Nevertheless, she has been most notably represented on television in Britain and abroad  not through her own scripts, but through two popular multipart adaptations of her novels: The Life and Loves of a She­ Devil (1983, televised 1986), which sharply satirized conventions of both heterosexual romance and the romance novel, and The Cloning of Joanna May (1989, televised 1991). a slightly more genteel version of She­ Devil's antics, this time as practiced by a devilish husband. The same creative team (including writer Ted Whitehead, director Philip Saville, and star Patricia Hodge) helmed both adaptations, but it is the highly praised The Life and Loves of a She-Devil that remains the strongest evocation of Weldon's own ethos, despite the intervening memory of Susan Seidelman's limp, Americanized film adaptation (She Devil, 1990).

     Oddly enough, Seidelman's film omitted Weldon's most visually rich and outrageous portion, the fantastic surgical reconstruction of the She-Devil into her nemesis, the physical form of female romantic perfection. This excision removed what is most remarkable throughout much of Weldon's work: her Mary Shelley-like coupling of deliberately excessive Gothic fantasy with sharp feminist perception.

     Weldon has not been alone in the use of such fantastic elements. Indeed, as Thomas Elsaesser (1988) has suggested, Weldon and "New Gothic" companion An­gela Carter (The Magic Toyshop, 1986) may present a female-centered television parallel to the male­ centered and often fantastic films of Peter Greenaway, Derek Jarman, and other directors prominent in the 1980s "New British Cinema." If these filmmakers were "learning to dream" again (to quote the familiar title of James Park's study). Weldon has been one of British television's more prominent instructors in the same task.