Fay Weldon
Novels

All of us have friends who are richer than ourselves, and they, you can be sure, have still richer friends. Most of us are within spitting distance of millionaires.

Elsa, a large, sexy and disheveled girl who hasn't a penny to her name except for the pittance from last week's paycheck, accompanies her friend and employer Victor Dawlish (aged forty-eight and rich by Elsa's standards) to spend her nineteenth birthday in the country house of Victor's millionaire friend Hamish, and Hamish's beautiful wife Gemma. It is to be a working weekend, during which Victor, an antique dealer, will appraise the mansion's furnishings (almost invariably of inferior quality, for which Hamish has overpaid). Elsa is to do the typing. Her speeds are, at best, mediocre (thirty words a minute in typing and forty in shorthand), but after all, she has other qualities which endear her to Victor. Besides, Gemma, who knows and likes Victor's wife, from whom he is separated, for some reason ahs specifically requested Elsa's presence.

Over the course of the weekend, Gemma relates to Elsa a tale of Nabokovian complexity - a "warning to wantons." As she called it - in an attempt to wean Elsa away from Victor and gain her for herself. It is this tale that weaves in and out of the events of the novel proper - itself a cross between the Brothers Grimm and The Story of O - engendering a vortex of action and reaction. In the end, however, Elsa's unique and endearing combination of innocence and folly successfully sabotages the jaded sophistication of her antagonists, and the proprieties of romanticism are observed.

This astonishingly inventive novel once again demonstrates Fay Weldon's imaginative vision and her abilities to extract the meaning of human experience from a highly distinctive and sometimes macabre narrative. A writer of originality and vitality, both in style and in her portrait of a world, she is a deadly caricaturist, and displays a piercing and elegant wit.

Bio from the book jacket:

Fay Weldon was born in England, but was brought up in New Zealand and went to St. Andrew's University in Scotland, where she studied economics and psychology. Thereafter, she had a series of "odd jobs and hard times" until the mid-sixties, when she started writing. She is the author of four novels (The Fat Woman's Joke, Down Among the Women and Female Friends and Remember Me), and several plays, both for the theater and television (among the latter, several of the first episodes of Upstairs, Downstairs).