Subscribe or Log In to Anytime
Access audio & film from your favourite writers and thinkers
Give the gift of Anytime
Treat someone to a Hay Festival Anytime subscription
Please subscribe to Hay Festival Anytime for access to this content (more details)
Subscribe for £20.00 or log in if you already have a subscription
 

Fay Weldon talks to Rosie Goldsmith

Before the War

 
Hay Festival 2016, 

A new, historical novel from the great tale-teller. Consider Vivien in November 1922. She is 24 and a spinster. She wears fashionably droopy clothes, but she is plain and - almost worse in those times - intelligent. At nearly six foot tall, she is known unkindly by her family as ‘the giantess’. Fortunately, Vivien is rich, so she can travel to London and bribe a charismatic gentleman publisher to marry her… This is a city fizzing with change, full of flat-chested flappers, shell-shocked soldiers and aristocrats clinging onto the past.

 

Fay Weldon talks to Rosie Goldsmith