The Life and Loves of a She-Devil' by Fay Weldon is basically about an ugly woman named Ruth who changes her very nature from that of a dutiful and obedient wife to a she-devil. This is when she is accused of being one by her adulterous and indifferent husband, who thinks that it is acceptable for him to love and have sex with other women as his marriage to Ruth was one of convenience' which shows that he didn't really love her; convenience' is associated with practicality, not love. .
A she-devil, what Ruth has become, is described in the Oxford English Dictionary as being:.
a malignant woman, female devil with the violence, desperation, cleverness or other qualities attributed to the Devil '.
To gain revenge on the people who hurt her, she reinvents herself under the surgeon's knife by going under extensive plastic surgery, uses feminine tricks such as doing what women are supposed' to do (for example she is very clean, hard-working and can serve men well) to direct people into doing what she wants, and explores key sites of power and powerlessness in present-day society, including the Christian church, the world of business, profit and loss, criminal law, the geriatric institution, the family home, and (especially) in the bedroom.
This book has been called a black comedy, but it is also a very sad meditation on facing one's lot in life, and coming to grips with a capricious fate that lavishly rewards some while cruelly withholding from others:.
to those who hath, such as Mary Fisher, shall be given, and to those who hath not, such as myself, even that which they have shall be taken away.
But more importantly, it is a bitterly satiric' portrait of a society that reinforces, twenty times over, that basic, cosmic unfairness, emphasized because Ruth is at a far bigger disadvantage than the average woman, being much uglier than the usual woman. Ruth's antagonist is a pretty blonde named Mary Fisher, a shallow woman whose own mother describes her as a little she-cat on heat'.