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Down Among the Women

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Brief Description
Celebrating 90 Years of Penguin Michael Joseph publishing the Mermaid collection - Fay Weldon's Down Among the Women 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... Read More
Format: Paperback / softback
$3600
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Down Among the Women

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Celebrating 90 Years of Penguin Michael Joseph publishing the Mermaid collection - Fay Weldon's Down Among the Women 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.

Series: The Mermaid Collection

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Book Details

INFORMATION

ISBN: 9781405982641

Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd

Format: Paperback / softback

Date Published: 11 September 2025

Country: United Kingdom

Imprint: Penguin Books Ltd

Audience: General / adult, Tertiary education, Professional and scholarly

DIMENSIONS

Spine width: 17.0mm

Width: 128.0mm

Height: 197.0mm

Weight: 212g

Pages: 256

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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