Wicked Women: Stories

Front Cover
Atlantic Monthly Press, 1997 - 311 pages

With Wicked Women, Fay Weldon has created an incisive collection of stories, turning her sharp eye on love, men, therapy, and the myriad of self-deceptions we depend on. Here we meet nuclear scientist Defoe Desmond, a post-Cold War irrelevancy, who is ineptly drawn to a youthful, wily, husband-stealing New Age journalist; three sisters named Edwina, Thomasina, and Davida, who are appalled when their mother finally gives their father a male heir--two years after his death; and Paula, who keeps so still waiting to hear evidence of her husband's adultery that she does not notice she's giving birth. Weldon's world is peopled with therapists who blithely destroy marriages and family ties, husbands and lovers whose greatest cruelty is their detachment, and clever women navigating the perils and pitfalls of domesticity. Her wicked humor and seasoned wisdom are as evident here as always--and tempered by great compassion for the foibles of the human heart.

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Contents

End of the Line
3
Run and Ask Daddy If He Has Any More Money
62
In the Great War II
70
Not Even a Blood Relation
74
TALES OF WICKED MEN
87
Wasted Lives
89
Love Amongst the Artists
102
Leda and the Swan
112
A Good Sound Marriage
188
Web Central
197
OF LOVE PAIN AND GOOD CHEER
207
Pains
209
A Question of Timing
221
Red on Black
228
KnockKnock
248
GOING TO THE THERAPIST
257

TALES OF WICKED CHILDREN
125
Tale of Timothy Bagshott
127
Valediction
161
FROM THE OTHER SIDE
175
Through a Dustbin Darkly
177
Santa Clauss New Clothes
259
Baked Alaska
273
The Pardoner
280
Heat Haze
294
Copyright

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About the author (1997)

Fay Weldon was born in Worcester, England on September 22, 1931. She read economics and psychology at the University of St. Andrews. She worked as a propaganda writer for the British Foreign Office and then as an advertising copywriter for various firms in London before making writing a full-time career. Her work includes over twenty novels, five collections of short stories, several children's books, non-fiction books, and a number of plays written for television, radio and the stage. Her collections of short stories include Mischief and Nothing to Wear and Nowhere to Hide. She wrote a memoir entitled Auto Da Fay and non-fiction book entitled What Makes Women Happy. She wrote the pilot episode for the television series Upstairs Downstairs. Her first novel, The Fat Woman's Joke, was published in 1967. Her other novels include Praxis, The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, Puffball, Rhode Island Blues, Mantrapped, She May Not Leave, The Spa Decameron, Habits of the House, Long Live the King, and The New Countess. Wicked Women won the PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award. She was awarded a CBE in 2001. Fay Weldon died on January 4, 2023, in a nursing home in Northampton, England, at the age of 91.

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