Fay Weldon Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Agate Nesaule Krouse

SOURCE: "Feminism and Art in Fay Weldon's Novels," in Critique, Vol. XX, No. 2, 1979, pp. 5-20.

In the following essay, Krouse contends that Weldon's novels contain both artistic value and a feminist consciousness without resorting to didacticism.

Recent interest in women writers and women's experience has helped establish some literary reputations and revive others. While many women writers are being ignored, several have gained prominence because they seem to speak for authentic female experience. Certainly a healthy curiosity about women's lives—too often falsified or ignored in contemporary fiction—has been responsible for the popular success and only somewhat guarded critical approval of such flawed novels as Alix Shulman's Memories of an Ex-Prom Queen, Erica Jong's Fear of Flying, Susan Schaeffer's Anya, and Lisa Alther's Kinflicks. A more important result of such curiosity is the increasingly serious attention paid to writers like Lessing, Drabble, and Atwood, who have revealed the lives...
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