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
Franklin Mountains State Park across the Rio Grande in Mexico and El Paso. Pictograms and mortar pits confirm a human presence in the mountains dating back more than 12,000 years. The Franklin Mountains are most likely named after Benjamin Franklin Coons, who in 1849 purchased a ranch in what is now El Paso. At first known as Coons Ranch, by 1851 the settlement took on Coons' middle name and was called Franklin. Despite the town being officially named El Paso in 1852, the locals continued to call it Franklin throughout the 1850s. The El Paso Tin Mining and Smelting Company operated a tin mine