A. S. Byatt

• Born: August 24, 1936
• Place of Birth: Sheffield, South Yorkshire, England
• Died: November 16, 2023
• Place of Death: London, England

ENGLISH NOVELIST, SHORT-STORY WRITER, AND CRITIC

Biography

Antonia Susan Byatt (BI-uht) began her career as a novelist in the shadow of her younger sister Margaret Drabble’s reputation as a novelist of quality and considerable popularity. Drabble, who used the family surname, began writing novels in the 1960s, and it was assumed that Byatt, who took her first husband’s surname, would become an academic. Byatt’s first book was a study of the novelist Iris Murdoch, and she became a part-time lecturer at the University of London in the 1960s after studies at Cambridge, Bryn Mawr, and Oxford.

Byatt published her first novel, Shadow of a Sun, in 1964 and a second, The Game, in 1967. These were received with quiet approval but had only modest sales, and in 1972, she became a full-time lecturer at the University of London. Drabble, who continued to publish novels throughout this period, became a popular book reviewer and a minor media celebrity, while Byatt quietly pursued her academic career. In 1978, Byatt produced a substantial novel, The Virgin in the Garden (1978), a formidable study of two intelligent, charming sisters starting their adult lives. It was offered as the first of a quartet. The second volume, Still Life, appeared in 1985, the third, Babel Tower, was published in 1996, and the fourth, A Whistling Woman, in 2002. The latter book brought the story of the two sisters up to the 1960s. Byatt’s fifth novel, Possession: A Romance (1990), which won the prestigious Booker Prize, overshadowed the trilogy in popularity and critical acclaim, although it may not be as fine artistically as The Virgin in the Garden and Still Life.

Possession: A Romance is an unusual example of a novel of literary merit and technical weight transcending the public’s usual lack of interest in serious novels, partly because the book is, at heart, a love story. However, part of its appeal lies in its technical complexity and incorporation of formidable amounts of poetry, supposedly written by the lovers. Two timeframes are used in the plot, in which late twentieth-century scholars are on the trail of two famous English writers of the nineteenth century. Byatt draws on her educational background to create successful imitations of nineteenth-century poetry, using the style of Robert Browning for the male lover and a combination of Christina Rossetti and Emily Dickinson for the female writer. The novelty of this, combined with a kind of scholastic, twentieth-century mystery tour, caught the fancy of both the critics and the public. (The book became a movie by the same name, directed by Neil LaBute in 2002.)

The novel is, in fact, not so much a surprise as it might seem, as Byatt’s fiction has a strong dependence on literary themes. Shadow of a Sun is a study of a young girl becoming mature under the influence of her father’s celebrity as a popular novelist. The Game is even more autobiographical in investigating the rivalry between two sisters, one a novelist and the other an academic. The Virgin in the Garden and Still Life also use the relationship between two sisters with strong literary interests. In Possession, Byatt went even further, including long stretches of poetry, supposed diary entries, letters, and complicated literary clues. The Biographer’s Tale (2000), in which a young literary scholar begins researching not a nineteenth-century writer but his biographer, includes the biographer’s index cards full of notes. One reviewer called the book a “detective story for the MLA set.” Byatt’s novels have their romantic attractions, but they are also witty explorations of the mean-spirited chicanery of the academic world and the emotional problems of late twentieth-century women who are intent upon their careers. Byatt’s interest in how women make lives for themselves connects her, if modestly and nondoctrinally, to the feminist movement in literature.

Like Drabble’s writing, Byatt’s is intelligent, witty, and unpedantic, and her works are accessible to a wide range of readers. Possession made Byatt a literary celebrity, and she subsequently succeeded to the role of intellectual commentator that her sister had previously filled.

After Possession, Byatt busied herself with considerable work as a book reviewer and producing shorter fiction. The resort to the narrower form does not cramp her zest for the odd idea. In “Morpho Eugenia” (1992), one of the two tales in Angels and Insects (1992; became a movie in 1995), she presents a young Victorian naturalist and his problems as a lover, husband, and scholar in a grand country house. The tale is furnished with long disquisitions on the exotic world of insects, which, like the literary intrusions of Possession, have a perverse charm. Byatt seems intent on reminding the reader of the pleasure of reading for reading’s sake, which was commonplace in the Victorian age. Thus, it seems reasonable that stories about Victorians should be similarly indulgent and expansive. The Matisse Stories (1993) are less eccentric but have a refreshing oddity of their own in using three works by the French painter Henri Matisse as the basis for short tales of contemporary urban living—a version of one kind of art imitating another.

Byatt’s short story collections The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye (1994) and Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice (1998) mark a turn to writing folk and fairy tales and about the study of folk and fairy tales. The title story of The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye, for instance, concerns a folklore scholar attending an academic conference in Istanbul who encounters a djinn. Offered the traditional three wishes, she uses her knowledge of folk tale conventions to make three decidedly unusual requests.

In the final decade of her career, she published Peacock & Vine: On William Morris and Mariano Fortuny (2016) and Ragnarok: The End of the Gods (2011). Before her 2023 death, Byatt published a final collection of short stories entitled Medusa's Ankles: Selected Stories (2021).

Bibliography

Alfer, Alexa, and Michael J. Noble, eds. Essays on the Fiction of A. S. Byatt. Greenwood Press, 2001.

Bawer, Bruce. “What We Do for Art.” New York Times Book Review, 30 Apr. 1995, www.nytimes.com/1995/04/30/books/what-we-do-for-art.html. Accessed 20 July 2024.

Bibby, Leanne. AS Byatt and Intellectual Women: Fictions, Histories, Myths. Springer Nature, 2022.

Burgess, Catherine. A. S. Byatt’s “Possession”: A Reader’s Guide. Continuum, 2002.

Campbell, Jane. A. S. Byatt and the Heliotropic Imagination. Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2012.

Chace, Rebecca. "A.S. Byatt, Scholar Who Found Literary Fame With Fiction, Dies at 87." New York Times, 17 Nov. 2023, www.nytimes.com/2023/11/17/books/as-byatt-dead.html. Accessed 20 July 2024.

Cheira, Alexandra. Wonder Tales in the Fiction of A. S. Byatt. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2023.

Franken, Christien. A. S. Byatt: Art, Authorship, Creativity. Palgrave Macmillan, 2001.

Hulbert, Ann. “The Great Ventriloquist: A. S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance.” In Contemporary British Women Writers: Narrative Strategies, edited by Robert E. Hosmer, Jr. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993.

McIntosh, Steven. "AS Byatt: Author, Critic and Poet Dies Aged 87." BBC, 17 Nov. 2023, www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-67448696. Accessed 20 July 2024.

Walezak, Emilie. "AS Byatt and the Quiddity of Things: A Material-semiotic Approach to Narrating the Human Through the Non-human." Textual Practice, vol. 36, no. 3, 2022, pp. 438-453. doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2022.2030119.

Wood, Harriet H. "A.S. Byatt Obituary." Guardian, 17 Nov. 2023, www.theguardian.com/books/2023/nov/17/as-byatt-dame-antonia-byatt-obituary. Accessed 20 July 2024.

Wood, James. “England.” In The Oxford Guide to Contemporary Writing. Oxford University Press, 2023.