The Changing Face of Fiction
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Fay Weldon
Italy, March 1990
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I never studied literature; I am no academic, no theoretician. All I can do, when considering the changing face of fiction, is to look back on my own life and, using my novels as evidence for and against me, give an account of a political and fictional journey through the last twenty-five years: taking, as it were, the feminist route: no other, or so I always felt, being open to me.
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When I was a student at a Scottish university, more time ago than I care to remember, I took a course in Moral Philosophy, along with Economics and Psychology. I got along best with Moral Philosophyan altogether less speculative discipline, I thought, than those other two ersatz sciences. But alas, I was not my Professor's favorite pupil. I found Kant, frankly, difficult. And, besides that, I was female. So on the whole he ignored my existence, apart from returning my essays unmarked and failing me my end of year examinationswhich proved he must have known, somewhere in his stony heart, that I and a couple of others like me, that is to say female, were there in his class. Otherwise he looked through us and round us. This Professor Knox of ours would remark, from time to time, during lectures, that women were incapable of rational thought or moral judgmenta view held by many then and some nowand the young men would nod sagely and agree. And we young women, those being the days they were, did not take offense: we thought that was the way the world was and there was no changing it: we just assumed there was something wrong with
us
; we could not be properly femalethat must be it. We already had evidence of this from our literature classesa diet of male fiction in which we never saw ourselvesfrom Kate in
Taming of the Shrew
to
Madame Bovary
to
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