Fay Weldon Fay Weldon Fay Weldon CBE FRSL (born 22 September 1931) is an English author, essayist, feminist and playwright. Weldon was born Franklin Birkinshaw in Birmingham, England, to a literary family, with both her maternal grandfather, Edgar Jepson (1863–1938), and her mother Margaret writing novels (the latter under the nom de plume Pearl Bellairs, from the name of a character in Aldous Huxley's short story "Farcical History of Richard Greenow"). Weldon spent her early years in Christchurch, New Zealand, where her father worked as a doctor. After her parents divorced, when she was six, she and her sister Jane spent the
Charles Franklin (author) Charles Franklin (author) Charles Franklin, the pen-name of Frank Hugh Usher, (22 October 1909 - 1976) born in Leicester, Leicestershire, a British author of mystery novels and spy novels. He also wrote under the pen-names Frank Usher, and Frank Lester. Little interested in the whodunit, still in vogue in England in the immediate post-war period, he followed in the footsteps of Peter Cheyney and David Hume and showed a clear penchant for Noir fiction and, less surprisingly, from the 1960s, for spy novels. Under the pseudonym Charles Franklin, he published his first novel, "Exit Without Permit", in 1946, with his