The author Fay Weldon died recently and I decided to revisit some of her work. I thought about what I remembered of her. ‘Go to work on an egg,’ the catch phrase of the Egg Marketing Board in the 1950s and 60s, was written by Fay Weldon during the years she worked in advertising before becoming a full time writer. The other thing I remember clearly is being terrified of the televised version of her novel ‘ The life and loves of a She Devil,’ far scarier even than Glen Close in the 1980s film ‘Fatal Attraction.’ Also I knew that she was very concerned about and involved with a wide range of feminist issues and the role of women in society in the fast changing twentieth century.
Looking along my bookshelves I found a slim volume by her that is quite different to her other work. ‘Letters to Alice’ is a strange hybrid sort of book, not quite a novel and not quite an English textbook. Even on a repeat reading I’m still not absolutely sure about Alice, the student to whom ‘Aunt Fay’ addresses these letters. Is she real or fictional? If I force myself to choose I will go for fictional, but very cleverly so. I think Fay Weldon is employing a particularly apposite literary device and maybe I would just like Alice to be real!
So what we are offered in this book is a set of letters written to someone who is reading Jane Austen for the first time and doing so very reluctantly. It is the ‘how can this be relevant to me in this day and age?’ conundrum. I wish I had had Fay Weldon as an English lecturer for I think she would have been wonderful. She addresses each concern with intellectual insight but also with humour. She is talking to a great extent about emotional intelligence, (of which I have written recently in Musings,) : ‘ And thus, by such discussion and such shared experience, do we understand ourselves and one another, and our pasts and our futures.’
Fay Weldon unravels for the reader the historical and cultural world into which Jane Austen was born and she does this with fascinating detail but we also see how the basic, fundamental human values change little over time. They are just dressed differently.
Fay tells Alice that: ‘You can practise the art of empathy very well in Pride and Prejudice, and in all the novels of Jane Austen, and it is this daily practice that we all need, or we will never be good at living, as without practice we will never be good at playing the piano.’
Whilst reading Fay Weldon’s treatise on everything Austen, I was reminded of another slim volume which I read when I was a student, more than a little reluctantly I seem to remember, just like Alice. E.M. Forster’s ‘Aspects of the Novel’ was required reading for my English Lit. Course at college and I remember finding it awfully dull. Now I really can’t see what the problem was. It reads easily and Forster works through story, people, plot etc with plenty of interesting illustrations to explain the use of the many aspects of the novel.
I think Forster would enjoy Fay Weldon’s ‘Letter to Alice,’ as they are both concerned greatly with the matter of humanity. Short books. Good reads.