She May Not Leave

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A brilliant and caustic cautionary tale from one of Britains best-loved and most controversial writers.
Hattie and Martyn are a decent, hard-working, ecologically-minded young couple partners with a new baby, bickering over whether they should get married or not and how to arrange their lives in a morally sustainable way. Hattie has given up work to look after baby Kitty, but she is, frankly, bored by domesticity. They meet Agnieszka, a Polish domestic paragon who's married to a bus driver back home and is sending money back to her old mother and sister. Morally responsible couple that they are, Martyn and Hattie take pity and invite her to live with them.

Hattie eventually succumbs to temptation and asks Agnieszka to baby-sit, and soon shes back at full-time work. In fact life is pretty much as it was before the baby came along, except the house is cleaner and better organized, and she's galloping ahead in her career. Martyn is thrilled and wants a marriage ceremony but Hattie refuses: life is perfect as it is, thanks to the existence of Agnieszka, who is modest, docile, prepared to work for a pittance, and not even too pretty for comfort. And if she tells the occasional lie the little sister turns out to be a child and her social attitudes are atrocious, well, they can be overlooked. She'll learn our ways along with the English language.

But soon, things begin to sour. Martyn and Agnieszka grow closer and it occurs to Hattie now that baby Kitty, given a choice, would choose Agnieszka over her. Her friends are warning her but that's too vulgar for consideration. And their lives are by now hopelessly intertwined it's too late. And so the downward spiral continues as visas, a marriage of convenience and even her own friends and family conspire to force Hattie out of her home and her partner's bed

Reviews

'A witty, wicked, lethally elegant novel.' Daily Telegraph 'Weldon is on top form in this latest novel, bringing to old dramas delicious new twists.' Daily Mail 'Weldon's style, that virtuoso of intelligence and insinuating garrulousness, achieves a kind of ideal equilibrium between therapy and gossip. It has all the irresistible allure of a really good bitch and the voluptuous resonance on a deeply self-indulgent bout of self-analysis.' Jane Shilling, The Times 'Gripping stuff ! Weldon is on fine form.' Observer

Author Bio

After hard times and odd jobs as a lone parent, Fay Weldon became one of the top advertising copywriters of her generation. She moved to TV drama (writing the pilot episode of the iconic series Upstairs, Downstairs) then turned to novels - including the classic The Life and Loves of a She Devil and The Cloning of Joanna May. A sequel to her acclaimed Love and Inheritance trilogy, Before the War, was published in 2017. Fay's been made a CBE for services to literature and she's currently a Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University.