Fay Weldon
Non-Fiction

Dame Rebecca West, that formidable elder stateswoman of English literature, died in 1983 at the age of ninety. In latter years she had become something of a legend - reporting back eloquently from the Nuremburg Trials, receiving awards confidently from American presidents, opposing puritanism magnificently at the Lady Chatterley trial. But she was above all a novelist of extraordinary courage and compassion, whose career spanned sixty-six years from the publication of her first novel, The Return of the Soldier, in 1918.

But like many a fictional heroine, the young Rebecca West was herself the victim of a long and hopeless love affair. Her love for H.G. Wells produced a son, Anthony, whose birth on the day after war broke out in 1914 marked the end of Rebecca's carefree existence on the edge of London's literary world and the beginning of a serious writing career, which would enable her to support herself and her son - an independent role few women contemplated in those days and fewer still had the strength of character or intellect to undertake.

It is to this pivotal point in Rebecca's life that Fay Weldon turns, highlighting in an orginal and fascinating way the conflicts and choices with which the twenty-one-year-old writer was confronted: letters from the future to the young Rebecca tell us something of Edwardian literary and political life, and specifically of H.G. Wells as both a writer and a philanderer; they also tell us much about Rebecca's dawning realization that nothing can be the same between them once Anthony is born, about her growing conviction that she must rely on her own resources to make some sort of life for herself and her son.

From her vantage point in the future, Fay Weldon is able to assure the young Rebecca that the decisions she makes will be significant ones in the forthcoming fight for the social, moral and financial independence that today's young women enjoy.

Bio from the book jacket:

Fay Weldon was born in England but was brought up in New Zealand and went to St Andrews University in Scotland, where she studied economics and psychology. Thereafter she had a series of 'odd jobs and bad times' until the mid-sixties when she started writing.