In September 1946, when she was 15, Weldon returned to England with her mother and sister. I’ve always been on their side – they are the unseen majority.' It was however a state of affairs which made me write a good few novels with overweight, plain women as their heroines. But that was not to be, despite a lifetime of diets. 'I’d be happier to have been seen as a skinny, feisty child, a slim and serious adult, and a handsome octogenarian with an interesting literary past. Or that’s what I thought she thought.' She goes on to explain how this view of herself affected her later writing career. My mother thought it was unlikely that anyone would marry me, and therefore I would have to pass exams, earn my own living and make my own way in the world. Weldon has described herself as a 'plump, cheerful child', stating in a blog post that began as an unpublished article for the Daily Mail: 'I was born large, blonde and big-boned into a family of small beautiful women. She attended Christchurch Girls' High School for two years from 1944.

She and her sister Jane spent the summers with her father, first in Coromandel, later in Auckland. In 1936, when she was five, her parents agreed to separate, later divorcing (1940). Weldon grew up in Christchurch, New Zealand, where her father, Frank Thornton Birkinshaw, worked as a doctor. Her maternal grandfather, Edgar Jepson (1863–1938), her uncle Selwyn Jepson and her mother Margaret Jepson wrote novels (the latter sometimes under the nom de plume Pearl Bellairs, from the name of a character in Aldous Huxley's short story 'Farcical History of Richard Greenow'). Weldon was born Franklin Birkinshaw to a literary family in Birmingham, England, on 22 September 1931. She said there were many reasons why she became a feminist, including the 'appalling' lack of equal opportunities and the myth that women were supported by male relatives.

Her work features what she described as 'overweight, plain women'. Married three times and with four children, Weldon was a self-declared feminist. Over the course of her 55-year writing career, she published 31 novels, including Puffball (1980), The Cloning of Joanna May (1989), Wicked Women (1995) and The Bulgari Connection (2000), but was most well-known as the writer of The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1983) which was televised by the BBC in 1986. Fay Weldon CBE FRSL (born Franklin Birkinshaw 22 September 1931 – 4 January 2023) was an English author, essayist and playwright.

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