Born in Morley, Yorkshire, Fielding is the daughter of a mill owner and a homemaker. She attended a girls' school and then went to Oxford, where she read English at St. Anne's College and received her B.A. in 1979. In a 31 May 1998 profile for The Observer (London), Robert Yates observed that while Fielding is hardly working class, she "could come on as the plain-speaking northerner whenever her contemporaries at Oxford threatened to get lost in pretensions." Yet, Fielding's views on Yorkshire are not always flattering either. The most repellent character in any of her books is television magnate Vernon Briggs in Cause Celeb, who tries unsuccessfully to pass off his greed, racism, and retrograde sexual attitudes as Yorkshire bluffness.
At Oxford, Fielding was reportedly a good, though not obsessively conscientious, student, interested in acting. After graduation she went to work in production for the BBC and contributed to current-affairs programs such as Nationwide, and to Playschool, a children's show. She also produced segments for Comic Relief, a widely successful televised appeal for African famine relief. Her work for this program was the stimulus for her first novel, Cause Celeb (1994), set amid African suffering.
This is a free page. This page contains 189 words. This
biography contains 3,177 words (approx. 11 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Biography with our Helen Fielding Access Pass.
