Fay Weldon – Neptune leads to marital shipwrecks

Getting a divorce at 91 may appear bizarre but is a strangely fitting epitaph for novelist Fay Weldon’s haunted history in the marital stakes. Her best known novel turned into a successful film The Life and Loves of a She-Devil is a tale of relentless and sadistic vengeance against a cheating husband and his mistress. Though she insisted it was really a tale of envy.

 Born 22 September 1931 5.50pm Alvechurch, England, with a philandering father who was abandoned and a wayward mother, from a bohemian free-loving, intellectual family, she had a rackety childhood. Her grandfather was a writer fascinated by astrology, poltergeists and ghosts which permeate her writings as well.

   She was an unexpectedly single mother at 22 by a nightclub doorman and went on to marry a schoolmaster 25 years older. He wanted the respectability of a marriage for job applications and didn’t want sex, but extraordinarily pimped her out to his friends and got her a job in a Soho clip joint. He was despatched and she married a jazz musician, who left her 30 years later for an astrologer who told him the marriage was compatible.  Much vituperative media coverage followed. She then married a poet and former bookseller 15 years her junior, who became her manager after their marriage in 1994. He is now accused of ‘coercive control and financial mismanagement’ despite having moved her into his mother’s house and signing half over to her.

 She is evidently now in a nursing home and can’t talk after a stroke, a back operation and grieving for one of her sons who died recently.    

  The gothic and spooky ambience of her life was there from the start with a New Zealand earthquake separating her father from the family and she never saw him again, through a surprise pregnancy, into sadistic husband Number One, thence onto the jazz musician. Having baled for his astrological soul-mate, he then died almost eight hours before their  divorce was finalised, allowing her to remarry. That did feel uncanny at the time.

  She is a Virgo as befits the author of 30 books, with her Sun on the cusp of her intense 8^th with Venus in Libra and Mars in vengeful Scorpio also in her 8^th. The 8^th house has a reputation for producing oddly eerie events and coincidences.

Her generational Saturn in Capricorn opposition Pluto square Uranus in Aries gives her grit, perseverance, initiative and a strongly innovative and disruptive/de-stabilising streak. Her Jupiter in flamboyant Leo opposes her Aquarius Moon and is in a lucky/adventurous trine to her Uranus.

  Two things are intriguing astrologically.  One is strong planet aspects in her chart to her Neptune/Pluto midpoint which points to supernatural, mystical and occult interests – as well as confusion, obsession and inner torment.

   More significantly for her matrimonial prospects, her Neptune falls in her relationship 7^th house and is exactly square her Sun/Moon midpoint, the marriage significator. Nuptial bliss for her is an area wreathed in confusion, deception and lack of commitment. Her second and third marriages were to creative types which would soak up some of it. But Neptune with its hallucinatory qualities, and its tendency to idealise and then condemn, raises impossible expectations and induces deep resentment when reality takes a bite out of the dream.

  There are no birth dates for any of the husbands or the weddings which is a shame.

  A strange and not exactly loveable woman.