Fay Weldon: Absolutely not Flaubert's parrot

Fay Weldon hadn't read Madame Bovary before deciding to adapt it for the stage. So she wasn't afraid to transform Emma's husband Charles into an intelligent and articulate man, creating a much more realistic and modern marriage. She talks to Rhoda Koenig

For an author of such fierce, spiky novels and stories, Fay Weldon is surprisingly gentle and motherly - though perhaps, considering not only her work but the number of women who dread turning into their parents, the latter adjective should be "good-motherly". A beehive shape topped by a sweet little face and a platinum bob, she potters about her house in Dorset, and cracks a despairing smile when I offer best wishes on her recent 70th birthday.

"Yes, it gets in all the newspapers now. There's no hiding." She settles on a black and tan print sofa, next to a painting of sheep. Weldon met Dolly the Sheep, and has given some thought to sheep. "They're quite endearing. I can see how someone would fall in love with them." On the rear wall of the fireplace, a rather saucy relief shows another sheep, watching the carryings-on of a nude shepherd and female friend. "Until she came along," says Weldon's husband, Nick Fox, a retired bookseller, "that sheep thought she was in with a chance."

Weldon's latest project is a stage adaptation of Madame Bovary. She hadn't read it before deciding to do the adaptation, but, she points out, neither had she opened Jane Eyre or Pride and Prejudice before she adapted them: "At university, I read economics!" She started on it eight years ago and got on the wrong track - "It was very 'and then, and then...'" - before rewriting it as "a chamber piece" and waiting until it was taken up by the director Nancy Meckler for her Shared Experience company.

Polly Teale directs, and Amanda Drew plays the title role, but Weldon wouldn't dream of attending rehearsals and telling them how. "Actors are like stepchildren. You don't speak unless spoken to." Not even if the stepchild is about to swallow a bottle of carbolic acid by accident? "Well, then I might ring up his mother really fast."

Breakfast with Emma has some interruptions and flashbacks involving other characters, but in essence it's a two-hander in which Mme Bovary confesses to her doctor husband that she has ruined them by secretly running up enormous debts with the draper, M. Lheureux, and that she's assuaged her boredom and romantic fantasies with lovers. The situation, Weldon says, is highly relevant to our own age, in which furious consumption and sexual adventuring get so many women in trouble. "Women today suffer terribly from boredom and frustration. Romanticism still has young girls in its grip. Emma says, 'I have been so disappointed.' It's the romantic dream - that everything will open up before you, and everything will be wonderful."

Weldon has said that feminism has succeeded. But how can that be if women are still so unhappy? "Feminism has succeeded. Women complain that they don't have equal pay [over the course of their careers], but it's their physiology that stops them earning. If women had equal pay, they wouldn't have babies. But women now choose how they live. I think there is less neurosis about, less sexual neurosis. I'm not saying women don't have any problems. So many women have a bad-tempered mien. Their resting position is anger. Everything has changed, but nothing is better."

Certainly, today no woman with Emma's looks and spirit would marry the Charles of the novel, not only an oaf but dangerous - he doesn't know how stupid he is. Thinking he can cure a club-footed man, he submits him to such torture that his leg must be amputated. In Weldon's version, Charles, though so besotted with Emma he can't see her clearly, is intelligent and articulate.

Why so great a change? Weldon feels that, with the Bovarys more evenly matched, not only is Charles more sympathetic, but the marriage is more realistic. "Flaubert's father was a doctor. Flaubert didn't like his father very much, so he put that experiment his father did into the book. So if he could do that to his father..." Weldon makes a gesture that says she felt she had reasonably exercised her literary and moral prerogative. "I just thought, 'Poor bloody Charles!'"

Does Weldon think that Emma is one of the wicked women who appear so often in her books? In her version, Emma repeatedly calls herself "wicked" and seems to justify the charge with her extravagance and her contempt for her husband and their daughter, whom she does not love. "She isn't a rewarding child," Emma tells Charles. "Not the one I hoped to have. She is a disappointment to me. She takes after you."

Weldon says: "Yes, I think Emma's wicked, but that doesn't mean that she's unforgivable. She has failed to love her child, but that's her misfortune, not her fault." And the shopping? "I blame M. Lheureux. He kept dangling those things in front of her all the time."

Though Weldon sees some aspects of the novel differently from its author, she does think that Flaubert "knows better than most male authors what goes on in a woman's mind. Tolstoy clearly never had any idea. I thought Roddy Doyle did very well in The Woman Who Walked into Doors, except that he saw that woman only as a victim. There really are other roles in life besides being beaten up." Younger men, Weldon feels, are getting better at understanding how women think. "I loved Nick Hornby's How to be Good, though no one else did. When I read that, I forgot it was a man writing it." What would she say is a characteristic distinction between the way men and women express themselves? "It's the order in which things are described. A woman will describe what someone looks like first, a man will say what he's doing."

After a long absence from writing plays for the stage and television, Weldon is enjoying her return to the boards. Her local theatre group has kept her busy. "I wrote a play for them called Flood Warning about a family trapped above an antique shop while the flood waters are rising - yes, I did mean that as something of a metaphor. I think it's an extremely clever one."

Weldon, a native New Zealander who came to England at 10, never suffered from the "cultural cringe" that afflicted her chippy colonial sisters, Germaine Greer and Carmen Callil. "I think if I'd come any later I would have, or if I'd stayed in New Zealand, because I would have realised that everything was happening elsewhere. But I was a scholarship girl in a fee-paying school - I thought I was better than everybody."

She used to be "terrified of public speaking, but little by little that changed. "Now I leap to my feet and public-speak at the drop of a hat." She most recently leapt up at the opening of a building at an Oxford college. "I told them their English department would function just as well in a cave. The architect was rather put out, but the teachers were happy, because they'd been told they were the most important thing, and the board were happy because they went away rubbing their hands and saying, 'Now we never have to spend money on another building again.'" She also planted a tree, but doesn't know what kind. "When I asked, they said, 'We're English, not botany.'"

Weldon recently began a novel about a woman who woke to find she had turned into a man, but "came up against a wall. It's such an obvious story, you can't think why nobody has written it before. Then, when you try to write it, you see. The muse prohibits it."

Since Weldon has preserved the French setting of Flaubert's story, it is disconcerting to see, in the script of Breakfast with Emma, that the male characters are referred to as "Mr". Is this a subtle reminder that the story could be taking place in England? "No, they are called 'Monsieur,'" Weldon says. "I just didn't know how to abbreviate it." She grins. "I wasn't making a point. I was just making a mistake."

'Breakfast with Emma', on tour now, opens at the Lyric Hammersmith, London W6 (020-8741 2311) on 5 Nov