In the Edinburgh Festival of 2010 during the presentation of the latest novel by Weldon at that time, Kehua, a woman from the public participated by saying that the author would be rightly valued one day. She merely expressed the generalized disappointment of her reading public towards the disdainful attitude adopted by the literary intelligentsia towards her narrative. This can find expression, for instance, in the fact that Fay Weldon has not often been given awards: She has won the Los Angeles Times Book Award with The Heart of the Country and her novel Worst Fears was shortlisted for the Whitbread Book Award. To her readers chagrin, she has never won the Booker Prize, although in 1978 she was nominated for it with her novel Praxis and in 1983 she was a member of the jury in charge of deciding the prizes —she always tells an anecdote about it which seems like an episode taken out from one of her novels.
Fay Weldon is an author revered by may women in the UK and elsewhere. In fact, her first novels made her a representative figure of what has been termed as the second wave of feminism. Moreover, not only has her extensive literary production reflected the lives of many British women for over four decades, but it has also constituted a sort of constant guidance to them. It has helped them to confront their worst fears and it has also enriched their good experiences. And, nonetheless, and against all reason, her narrative is wrongly undervalued by the critical establishment. In this regard, her novels are seen as harmless and superficial portrait of the society in which the author lives, to which she applies a considerable amount of histrionics in order to disguise the supposedly scant literary value of her production.
I think this sad state of affairs is mostly due to a lack of suitable criticism to the bulk of her production. The academician Regina Barreca, who is probably the maximum authority in Fay Weldon´s narrative, has studied her skillful use of humor and the way she employs it as therapy and a way of liberating women. And, somehow, she has even followed Weldon´s example in her own literary production. Likewise, Finuala Dowling has written a superb study of some of Weldon´s first novels. It could be said of these initial novels that there is a sort of gothicism naturally oozing from the ruthless reality they reflect, that is to say, from the monstrous character of a kind of relationships which place women in a helpless position.
Nonetheless, the novels written in times of better conditions for women seem to have fallen in a critical vacuum. They are generally discarded for their exaggeration and eccentricity without stopping to consider that these features are what remains of that Gothic spirit which inevitably became pervasive in the recreation of those difficult times portrayed in her early narrative. However, and this may seem somewhat confusing, this Gothic essence is still dominant in novels depicting more favourable circumstances for women. It is as if Fay Weldon did not hesitate to go on using this monstrous-focused perspective when analyzing apparently innocuous daily and sentimental matters.
Hence, my thesis on her was born on account of the necessity to fill what I considered to be a critical vacuum. Although prestigious academicians like Susanne Becker in Gothic Forms of Feminine Fictions and Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik in Gothic and the Comic Turn have included Weldon´s fictions in the Gothic mode, in its comic tendency, her literary production has never been analysed following a systematic framing of it in a Gothic context. That is what I have tried to do in my work; I have aimed at providing the right theoretical parameters with the help of which most her extensive literary production may be properly analysed and valued. I want to show that through the right approach some so far unnoticed descriptive features of her narrative become clearly visible.
JUSTIFICATION
