Letters: In brief

Sir: How demeaning was Deborah Ross's interview with Fay Weldon! She presented this fascinating writer as frivolous, inconsistent and silly. I assume that Ross thought she might make journalistic capital out of the contrast between this image of unmitigated hedonism, and the feminist movement with which Fay Weldon has been associated.

Fay Weldon has made it clear that she is interested in people, not in pose. Her writing is political in that it presents people in situations, in relationships in social climate. It is endearing in its sympathy for vulnerability, savage in its undermining of pretention. The effect of Deborah Ross's report was to reveal her own triviality.

JUDY SPROXTON,

Top Farm House

Temple Grafton, Alcester

Sir, "I wanted clothes that I would wear but shrunk to size" (Fashion, 24 June). The incredibility of this concept is only weighed by the belief that "You either had Gap ... or Paul Smith". What world are these women living in? - one of "style over content" if the admissions of Sarah Hiscox are to be believed. In the fashion war zone of the teenage years, this indoctrination that image is everything will manifest itself in demands for obscenely expensive clothes. Children learn by example; elitist and capitalistic ideals imbued in children will be perpetuated in adulthood by the divisive belief in a culture of "haves and have-nots" so endemic in 20th century Western society.

PAULINE STILGES

Letchworth, Hertfordshire