Breakfast at Bulgari’s?

British author fay weldon is no stranger to controversy. Her provocative views on everything from rape (worse things could happen to a woman) to cosmetic surgery (it enhances your sex life) to men (they’re the new underclass) have generated plenty of outrage.

Nothing, though, compared to the brouhaha that erupted last week when it emerged that her latest novel, The Bulgari Connection, which was commissioned and privately printed by the Italian jeweler, will soon enjoy mainstream publication.

Critics have accused Weldon, a 1979 Booker Prize nominee for Praxis, of compromising her artistic integrity. Bulgari is mentioned frequently throughout what is billed by her publisher, HarperCollins, as a “high-class thriller,” but Weldon professes to be surprised and amused by the fuss. A former advertising copywriter, she dismisses the high-minded notion that art should be separate from commerce. “I’m just a jobbing writer, really.”

That self-description is somewhat disingenuous. Weldon, 69 and the mother of four grown sons, has written 21 novels — one of which, The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, was made into a Hollywood film starring Meryl Streep — as well as numerous screen and stage plays. A sharp-witted observer — and occasional instigator — of the war between the sexes, Weldon has been labeled both a feminist and antifeminist.

While her early novels abound with unfaithful, oppressive men and scorned, vengeful women, her later work has tackled subjects like cloning, therapy and aging. But Weldon hasn’t mellowed too much: in her last novel, Rhode Island Blues, the 83-year-old heroine has a steamy affair with a man she picks up at a funeral, while her thirty-something granddaughter lives a celibate life of quiet desperation. At the home in North London she shares with her third husband and manager, Nick Fox, who is 15 years her junior, Weldon is busy on her next novel. “It’s about purgatory and the denial of death,” she says with a gleam in her eye. Sounds like devilish good fun.

Q&A

TIME: Is the criticism of your product-placement deal with Bulgari justified?
WELDON: Product placement has always seemed to me a rather sneaky thing, very insidious. My contract required me to mention Bulgari 12 times. They got at least three times that, as well as the title. What could be more upfront than that? I’m not sure how I got from there to being branded morally corrupt.

TIME: How supportive have your fellow writers been?
WELDON: Writers understand that you write for money, which many other people don’t (laughs). Writers also understand the restrictions that they have publishing the normal way. Publishers are ruled by numbers like everyone else. The free expression of ideas in a consumer society is becoming increasingly rarified.

TIME: The Oxford Companion to English Literature describes your novels as “expressing the rising feminist consciousness of the ’70s.” Are you still a feminist?
WELDON: Of course. But times have changed. Feminism has achieved its aims, at least in the developed world. Women are now concerned with the competing demands of career and family. The rule of work has replaced the rule of men.

TIME: Feminist author Doris Lessing thinks young women are now writing “instantly forgettable” novels. Have standards dropped that much?
WELDON: I think they’ve improved. The problem is that writers now start very young. So they write about their love lives, which are of little interest to anyone. But the way they do it is rather good. By the time they’re in their forties they’ll be writing about something of universal concern, so we have something to look forward to.

TIME: You seem to court controversy. Is it deliberate?
WELDON: When asked what I think I answer as truthfully as I can. But the truth tends to vary from day to day.