Down Among the Women (1972), Female Friends (1974), and Remember Me (1976), three of Fay Weldon’s early novels, share similar themes, narrative voices, and stylistic elements. Although the novels explore different aspects of women’s lives, the similarities call for a study of Weldon’s early techniques and contribution to twentieth-century literature. I study Weldon’s early works to reveal her belief that feminism evolved through small, individual changes rather than general societal upheaval. I center my study on motherhood and wifehood in Down Among the Women, friendship in Female Friends, and motherhood in Remember Me. In each novel, women make changes in these specific areas of their lives, and through these changes, Weldon rewrites traditional women as newly defined feminists. My readings of each novel support my contention that although the women are not reformed in every facet of their lives, Weldon defines them as feminists because they have actively redefined at least one firmly rooted feminine role to benefit themselves.

Contemporary British novelist Fay Weldon negotiates the postmodern "culture industry" as the self-conscious heir to a traditon of women writers dating back to the Middle Ages. Like her predecessors, Weldon defensively and offensively negotiates ideological constructions of womanhood, including injunctions to chastity, modesty, and silence; prohibitions against formal education for women; disdain for the literary production and commercial success of women writers; and the application of double standards in the critical reception of their works. Modernizing the strategies traditionally deployed by women writers, Weldon engages with the advertising industry and the mass-oriented literature of radio and television, using them to construct a career and a public identity for herself while advancing an alternative history of women in the twentieth and early twenty-first century. She exploits the distinctions between high culture, popular culture and mass culture in order to provoke critical reflection; partly for this reason, her work deliberately resists academic criticism. The novels Praxis, Puffball, The Cloning of Joanna May, The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, and The Bulgari Connection explore the phenomenon Walter Benjamin described as the nullification of "aura" in the age of mechanical reproduction; they interrogate the connections between several kinds of reproduction associated with human gestation, women's bodies and social identities, and language and literature. Weldon's interrogative fictions experiment with the novel form, and their reception has been mixed, often splitting along gender lines. Feminists have not always embraced Weldon because she questions everything. Because her prolific output is ongoing, Weldon's achievement as Woman of Letters cannot yet be fully assessed.

In this study of several novels each by Barbara Pym, Fay Weldon, and Margaret Atwood, I focus on two areas: the ways in which female protagonists break out of their victimization by individuals, by institutions, and by cultural tradition, and the ways in which each author uses a structural pattern in her novels to propel her characters to solve their dilemmas to the best of their abilities and according to each woman's personality and strengths.