In 1983, English author Fay Weldon wrote her most famous work: The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, a bawdy, feminist black comedy about a woman exacting revenge on her unfaithful husband. More than 30 years later, it has been announced that Weldon, now 84, is writing a sequel about a man who changes gender to regain power lost “in the fall out of the feminist revolution”.
The Death of a She-Devil, which will be published by Head of Zeus in April 2017, follows Weldon’s recent inflammatory comments about transgender people and feminism to the Sunday Times, where she said women now lived easier lives than men and that: “The only way men have of fighting back against the natural superiority of women is by becoming women themselves.”
In The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, Fay Weldon’s ruthless protagonist Ruth is labelled a “she-devil” by her unfaithful husband and resolves to behave accordingly, destroying his life through a series of violent and cunning acts to achieve sexual and financial dominance.
This time, the central character is Tyler Patchett, “an ultra-confident twentysomething man... [who] won’t be satisfied with his life until he can transition into the ultimate symbol of power and status: a woman”. Publisher Head of Zeus called the sequel a “provocative fable” that “stars a new kind of ‘heroine’”.
In an interview with the Sunday Times, Weldon said women today acted like victims. “Feminism was necessary in the 1970s because men were so awful. By the end of the 1980s they had realised what was going on and, to their credit, changed. But women didn’t change and went on being victims.” She also said she found it significant that transgender celebrity Caitlyn Jenner is “still speaking with a man’s voice” and claimed men worked harder than women: “Men invent things: if this were an all-woman society, we wouldn’t have television. We’d have lots of nice cushions.”
Publisher Laura Palmer said Weldon’s controversial comments were examples of “Fay’s usual mischievous streak … Life and Loves of a She-Devil is something I read at school, so to be coming back to that world now, to conclude the story in the modern day is great.”
“I love the way Fay works with modern life and has basically changed her own story to work with current times. She’s saying that it is women who have all the power and all the status now, and that is why men want to become women,” Palmer said. “Her main character is an alpha male, very confident – you’d think he’d have everything he wants, but he sees what women have and he wants all of that instead.”
Since releasing her first novel, The Fat Woman’s Joke, in 1967, Weldon has written more than 20 novels, as well as short stories and television dramas. Since 2006, she has worked as professor of creative writing at Brunel University in London.
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