Death of a She Devil, by Fay Weldon

Maybe if you weren’t there, reading Fay Weldon in the 1980s, you just won’t ‘get’ this sequel to her most famous novel, Life and Loves of a She Devil…

I don’t mean that you can’t follow the novel.  It’s decades since I read SheDevil#1 and I’d forgotten the detail of it but Weldon provides all you need to know in SheDevil#2.  I mean that for women of my generation the novel will evoke memories of all kinds of feminist battles large and small and the sense of excitement that came with yes, changing the world.  Today we can’t use the term The Sisterhood without self-mockery, but back then we knew we were working with women across a yet-to-be-globalised world, and we knew with a sense of empowerment that we were not alone.

And we were all very serious about it.  We were reading such serious stuff about feminism.  We were reading The…