Down Among the Women
  • Published: 6 January 2026
  • ISBN: 9781405982641
  • Imprint: Michael Joseph
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 256
  • RRP: $37.00

Down Among the Women

Formats & editions
Paperback
6 Jan 2026
EBook
11 Sep 2025
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Celebrating 90 Years of Penguin Michael Joseph publishing the Mermaid collection: Fay Weldon's Down Among The Women with a foreword by Jenny Colgan

\"Down among the women. What a place to be!\"

So says Wanda, a former radical who left her husband and raised her daughter Scarlet to be as liberated as she. But twenty-year-old Scarlet, with an abortion already behind her, is about to discover real liberation – as a single mother in Fifties’ London.

Yet Scarlet’s not alone. Meet her friends: Sylvia, the born victim; respectable Jocelyn, willingly trapped in a dull, bourgeois marriage; Audrey, bristling to break free of her conventional life; and Helen, beautiful, vibrant – and very doomed.

Over the course of twenty years, from the Fifties to the Seventies, Scarlet, Wanda and their friends will wonder if they can ever become the women they always dreamed of being.
  • Published: 6 January 2026
  • ISBN: 9781405982641
  • Imprint: Michael Joseph
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 256
  • RRP: $37.00
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Praise for Down Among the Women

A national treasure

Literary Review

Wickedly stylish. Bursting with intelligence and fire

Daily Telegraph

Prolific and provocative, Weldon shines brightest in the league table of British women novelists

Time Out

A queen of words

Caitlin Moran
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