Down Among the Women: The bold feminist fiction classic (The Mermaid Collection)

Fay Weldon

Sep 2025 · Random House

Ebook

256

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Eligible

This book will become available on September 11, 2025. You will not be charged until it is released.

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About this ebook

Rediscover the brilliance of Down Among the Women in the Mermaid Collection - classic books by popular pioneering female authors republished to delight new generations of readers. Pre-order this gorgeous edition now.

A classic from beloved national treasure Fay Weldon sees four women break the shackles of patriarchy and domesticity in 1950s London, from the author of The Lives and Loves of a She-Devil

With a foreword by Jenny Colgan

‘Down among the women. What a place to be!’

So says Wanda, a former radical who left her husband and raised her daughter Scarlet to be as liberated as she. But twenty-year-old Scarlet, with an abortion already behind her, is about to discover real liberation – as a single mother in Fifties’ London.

Yet Scarlet’s not alone. Meet her friends: Sylvia, the born victim; respectable Jocelyn, willingly trapped in a dull, bourgeois marriage; Audrey, bristling to break free of her conventional life; and Helen, beautiful, vibrant – and very doomed.

Over the course of twenty years, from the Fifties to the Seventies, Scarlet, Wanda and their friends will wonder if they can ever become the women they always dreamed of being.

Praise for Fay Weldon:
'A national treasure' Literary Review
'Wickedly stylish. Bursting with intelligence and fire' Daily Telegraph
'Prolific and provocative, Weldon shines brightest in the league table of British women novelists' Time Out
'A queen of words' Caitlin Moran

About the author

Born in Birmingham but brought up in New Zealand, Fay returned to the UK aged 15 just after the Second World War. After studying at St Andrews, she moved to London in the early 1950s, working for the Foreign Office and then in advertising. She began writing for radio and television in 1963 when she fell pregnant with her first child, producing plays for ITV and the BBC and writing three episodes of Upstairs Downstairs, including the first in 1971. In the end, she wrote over 70 scripts for television, including an adaptation of Pride & Prejudice in 1980. Her first novel was published in 1967 and was followed by over 30 others, including The Lives and Loves of a She-Devil which became a beloved BBC series. Fay died in Northampton, England on 4 January 2023, at the age of 91.

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