Rarely has Oscar Wilde's aphorism that life imitates art far more than art imitates life been as accurate as in the case of Fay Weldon.

The exaggerated plots of the books by this author, who has become a feminist model, are full of situations that she describes with biting wit and a sharp satirical pen.

Gina Thomas

Features correspondent based in London.

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Leaving aside the fantasy element, what she experienced herself far surpasses her fictions, much more so, like the title character of The She-Devil, of women taking grotesque revenge on men by far in weirdness.

Marrying a much older man who doesn't want to have sex with his wife but using her as a sex worker to delight in accounts of her experiences, or the second husband suddenly succumbing to a heart attack hours before the divorce is final sounds like something out of Fay Weldon's black humorous novels, but it actually happened to her.

In her memoirs, which she slyly titled "Auto da Fay," she professed a longing for a doomsday when the narrative threads of life would be neatly stitched together, all of life's mysteries explained, and the meaning of events clear.

Weldon surmised that literature fills this need while reality fails.

On printed pages, readers could identify beginnings, middles, and ends, and where morality lay.

The difficult inheritance of one's own family

In view of this observation, it is all the more astonishing that Weldon claimed to just start writing and let the characters guide the development of her stories as if by chance in life.

She saw her own disorderly circumstances as a legacy from her maternal grandmother, who let the trauma of the blows she suffered through “male conceit” with devastating consequences reverberate in subsequent generations.

Their daughter, Fay Weldon's mother, had emigrated to New Zealand with her doctor husband to escape their dysfunctional family.

However, she returned to England in 1946 after the failure of her own marriage and, as a single mother of two daughters, had to make ends meet as a housekeeper and author of romances.

Her daughter Fay repeated this pattern when she gave birth to an illegitimate son at twenty and held stints as a waitress or clerk in the Foreign Office's Eastern Europe department before developing her literary talents first as a copywriter for commercials and later as a prolific television play - and novelist could use.

It is obvious to trace Fay Weldon's feminism to this biography.

Her desire to provoke herself into the conversation, especially when she had a book to sell, has sometimes earned her the ire of other feminists, such as when she claimed that being raped was not the worst thing.

She didn't want to be labeled as a feminist activist, but wanted to be recognized as an author who also happened to be a feminist.

When she nearly died a few years ago, she reported that she had stood in front of Heaven's Gate and found to her disappointment that it was garishly colored and double-glazed.

We will never find out what she finds there now.

Fay Weldon passed away on Thursday at the age of ninety-one.