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A. S. Byatt

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Dame Antonia Susan Duffy (Template:Nee; 24 August 1936 – 16 November 2023), known professionally by her former married name, A.Template:NbspS. Byatt (Template:IPAc-en Template:Respell),<ref name="Pronunciation">Template:Cite news</ref> was an English critic, novelist, poet and short-story writer. Her books have been translated into more than thirty languages.<ref name="The Paris Review"/><ref name="Honorary Fellows Newnham College, Cambridge">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

After attending the University of Cambridge, she married in 1959 and moved to Durham. It was during Byatt's time at university that she began working on her first two novels, subsequently published by Chatto & Windus as Shadow of a Sun (1964; reprinted in 1991 with its originally intended title, The Shadow of the Sun) and The Game (1967). Byatt took a teaching job in 1972 to help pay for the education of her son. In the same week she accepted, a drunk driver killed her son as he walked home from school. He was 11 years of age. Byatt spent a symbolic 11 years teaching, then began full-time writing in 1983. The Virgin in the Garden (1978) was the first of The Quartet,<ref name="Newman-2003">Template:Cite journal</ref> a tetralogy of novels that continued with Still Life (1985), Babel Tower (1996) and A Whistling Woman (2002).

Byatt's novel Possession: A Romance received the 1990 Booker Prize, while her short story collection The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye (1994) received the 1995 Aga Khan Prize for Fiction. Her novel The Children's Book was shortlisted for the 2009 Booker Prize and won the 2010 James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Her critical work includes two studies of Dame Iris Murdoch (who was a friend and mentor), Degrees of Freedom: The Early Novels of Iris Murdoch (1965) and Iris Murdoch: A Critical Study (1976). Her other critical studies include Wordsworth and Coleridge in Their Time (1970) and Portraits in Fiction (2001).

Byatt was awarded the Shakespeare Prize in 2002, the Erasmus Prize in 2016, the Park Kyong-ni Prize in 2017 and the Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award in 2018. She was mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature.<ref name="Nobel 2012">Template:Cite news</ref>

Early lifeEdit

Antonia Susan Drabble was born in Sheffield, England, on 24 August 1936,<ref name="British Council: Literature"/> as the eldest child of John Frederick Drabble, QC, later a County Court judge, and Kathleen Bloor, a scholar of Browning.<ref name="Leith 2009"/> Her sisters are the novelist Margaret Drabble and the art historian Helen Langdon. Her brother Richard Drabble KC is a barrister.<ref name=Gruber>Template:Cite news</ref> The Drabble father participated in the placement of Jewish refugees in Sheffield during the 1930s.<ref name="Art Thou Contented">Template:Cite news</ref> The mother was a Shavian and the father a Quaker.<ref name="Art Thou Contented"/> As a result of the bombing of Sheffield during the Second World War the family moved to York.<ref name="Cercles"/>

Byatt was educated at two independent boarding schools, Sheffield High School and The Mount School, a Quaker boarding school at York.<ref name="Leith 2009"/>

An unhappy child, Byatt did not enjoy boarding school, citing her need to be alone and her difficulty in making friends.<ref name="Leith 2009"/> Severe asthma often kept her in bed where reading became an escape from a difficult household.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> She attended Newnham College, Cambridge, Bryn Mawr College (in the United States), and Somerville College, Oxford.<ref name="British Council: Literature"/><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> Having studied French, German, Latin and English at school, she later studied Italian while attending Cambridge so that she could read Dante.<ref name="The Paris Review"/>

Byatt lectured in the Department of Extra-Mural Studies of the University of London (1962–71),<ref name="British Council: Literature">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> the Central School of Art and Design and from 1972 to 1983 at University College London.<ref name="British Council: Literature"/> She began writing full-time in 1983.<ref name="2009 Booker Prize shortlist"/>

Personal life and deathEdit

Byatt married Ian Charles Rayner Byatt in 1959 and moved to Durham.<ref name="The Paris Review"/> They had a daughter together,<ref name="The Saturday Profile"/> as well as a son, Charles, who was killed by a drunk-driver at the age of 11 while walking home from school.<ref name="The Paris Review"/><ref name="Leith 2009"/><ref name="Cercles"/> She spoke of her son's death and its influence on her lecturing and subsequent career after publishing The Children's Book, in which the image of a dead child features.<ref name="The Paris Review"/><ref name="Leith 2009"/> She came to regard her academic career symbolically.<ref name="The Paris Review"/> She later wrote the poem "Dead Boys".<ref name="Leith 2009"/> The marriage was dissolved in 1969. Later that year, Byatt married Peter Duffy, and they had two daughters.<ref name = Telegraph>Template:Cite news</ref><ref name="Leith 2009">Template:Cite news</ref><ref name="The Saturday Profile"/>

Byatt's relationship with her sister Margaret Drabble was sometimes strained due to the presence of autobiographical elements in both their writing. While their relationship was no longer especially close and they did not read each other's books, Drabble described the situation as "normal sibling rivalry"<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> and Byatt said it had been "terribly overstated by gossip columnists."<ref>Desert Island Discs, BBC Radio 4, 16 June 1991.</ref> Byatt was an agnostic, though she maintained an affinity for Quaker services.<ref name="Cercles"/><ref name = Telegraph/> She enjoyed watching snooker, tennis, and football.<ref name = Telegraph/><ref name="That thinking feeling">Template:Cite news</ref>

Byatt lived primarily in Putney, and died at home on 16 November 2023, at the age of 87.<ref name = Telegraph/><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

InfluencesEdit

Byatt was influenced by Henry James<ref name="The Paris Review"/> and George Eliot<ref name="Leith 2009"/><ref name="Cercles"/> as well as Emily Dickinson,<ref name="Cercles"/> T. S. Eliot, Samuel Taylor Coleridge,<ref name="Cercles"/> Tennyson<ref name="Leith 2009"/> and Robert Browning,<ref name="Leith 2009"/> in merging realism and naturalism with fantasy. She was not an admirer of the Brontë family,<ref name="The Paris Review"/> nor did she like Christina Rossetti.<ref name="Cercles"/> She was ambivalent about D. H. Lawrence.<ref name="The Paris Review"/> She knew Jane Austen's work off by heart before her teens.<ref name="Cercles"/> In her books, Byatt alluded to, and built upon, themes from Romantic and Victorian literature.<ref name="British Council: Literature"/> She cited art historian John Gage's book on the theory of colour as one of her favourite books to reread.<ref name="The Paris Review"/>

WritingEdit

FictionEdit

Byatt wrote a lot while attending boarding school but had most of it burnt before she left.<ref name="The Paris Review"/>

She began writing her first novel while at the University of Cambridge, where she did not attend many lectures but when she did, she passed the time attempting to write a novel, which—given her limited experience of life—involved a young woman at university trying to write a novel, a novel, her novel, which—she knew—was "no good".<ref name="The Paris Review"/> She left it in a drawer when she was finished.<ref name="The Paris Review"/> After departing Cambridge, she spent one year as a postgraduate student in the United States and began her second novel, The Game, continuing to write it at Oxford when she returned to England.<ref name="The Paris Review"/> After getting married in 1959 and moving to Durham, she left The Game aside and resumed work on her earlier novel.<ref name="The Paris Review"/> She sent it to literary critic John Beer, whom she had befriended while at Cambridge.<ref name="The Paris Review"/> Beer sent Byatt's novel to the independent book publishing company Chatto & Windus.<ref name="The Paris Review"/> From there Cecil Day-Lewis wrote her a response and invited her to lunch at The Athenaeum.<ref name="The Paris Review"/> Day-Lewis was Byatt's first editor; D. J. Enright would succeed him.<ref name="Cercles"/>

Shadow of a Sun, Byatt's first novel, is about a girl and her father and was published in 1964.<ref name="British Council: Literature"/> It was reprinted in 1991 with its originally intended title, The Shadow of the Sun, intact.<ref name="The Paris Review"/> The Game, published in 1967, concerned the dynamics between two sisters.<ref name="British Council: Literature"/> The reception for Byatt's first books became confused with her sister's writing; her sister had a quicker rate of publication.<ref name="The Paris Review"/>

The family theme is continued in The Quartet,<ref name="Newman-2003"/> Byatt's tetralogy of novels, which begins with The Virgin in the Garden (1978) and continues with Still Life (1985), Babel Tower (1996) and A Whistling Woman (2002).<ref name="British Council: Literature"/> Her quartet is inspired by D. H. Lawrence, particularly The Rainbow and Women in Love. The family portrayed in the quartet are from Yorkshire.<ref name="British Council: Literature"/> Byatt said the idea for The Virgin in the Garden came in part from an Template:Linktext class she taught in which she had read Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and in part from her time living in Durham in 1961, the year in which her son was born.<ref name="The Paris Review"/> The book was an attempt to understand what could be achieved if Middlemarch were written in the middle of the twentieth century.<ref name="The Paris Review"/> Byatt's book features a powerful death scene, which she invented in 1961 (inspired by Byatt's reading of Angus Wilson's book The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot and the accident in its opening), a death scene that has drawn complaints from numerous readers for its vividness.<ref name="The Paris Review"/> Describing mid-20th-century Britain, the books follow the life of Frederica Potter, a young intellectual studying at Cambridge at a time when women were heavily outnumbered by men at that university, and then tracing her journey as a divorcée with a young son as he makes a new life in London. Byatt says some of the characters in her fiction represent her "greatest terror which is simple domesticity."<ref name="Leith 2009"/> Like Babel Tower, A Whistling Woman touches on the utopian and revolutionary dreams of the 1960s.<ref name="Leith 2009"/>

Also an accomplished short story writer, Byatt's first published collection was Sugar and Other Stories (1987).<ref name="British Council: Literature"/> The Matisse Stories (1993) features three pieces, each describing a painting by the eponymous painter; each is the tale of an initially smaller crisis that shows the long-present unravelling in the protagonists' lives.<ref name="British Council: Literature"/> The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye, published in 1994, is a collection of fairy tales.<ref name="British Council: Literature"/> Byatt's other short story collections are Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice, published in 1998, and Little Black Book of Stories, published in 2003.<ref name="British Council: Literature"/> Her books reflect a continuous interest in zoology, entomology, geology,<ref>Template:Cite magazine</ref> and Darwinism<ref name="The Paris Review"/> among other repeated themes. She is also interested in linguistics and takes a keen interest in the translation of her books.<ref name="The Paris Review"/> Byatt said: "I can't say how important it was to me when Angela Carter said 'I grew up on fairy stories—they're much more important to me than realist narratives'. I hadn't had the nerve to think that until she said it, and I owe her a great deal".<ref name="Leith 2009"/> Carter, in an earlier (first) meeting with Byatt after a Stevie Smith poetry reading, had dismissed Byatt's work, so this change of heart vindicated Byatt's approach to writing and Byatt readily acknowledged it.<ref name="The Paris Review"/>

Template:External media Possession (1990) parallels the emerging relationship of two contemporary academics with the lives of two (fictional) 19th-century poets whom they are researching.<ref name="British Council: Literature"/> It won the 1990 Booker Prize and was adapted for a film released in 2002.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

Byatt's novella Morpho Eugenia was included in Angels & Insects (1992), which was turned into the eponymous 1995 film; that film received an Academy Award for Best Costume Design in 1997.<ref name="British Council: Literature"/><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Byatt's novel The Biographer's Tale, published in 2000, she originally intended as a short story titled "The Biography of a Biographer", based on her notion of a biographer's life in a library investigating another person's life.<ref name="The Paris Review"/> This she developed into writing about a character called Phineas G. Nanson, who is attempting to learn about a biographer for a book he intends to write, but who can only locate fragments of his three unwritten biographies, which are on Galton, Ibsen and Linnaeus.<ref name="The Paris Review"/> Phineas Gilbert Nanson is named after an insect and is almost an anagram of Galton, Ibsen and Linnaeus, though Byatt said this was an uncanny coincidence that she did not realise until afterwards.<ref name="The Paris Review"/>

The Children's Book, published in 2009, is a novel spanning from 1895 until the end of the First World War, centring on the fictional writer Olive Wellwood.<ref name="2009 Booker Prize shortlist"/> She is based upon E. Nesbit.<ref name="The Saturday Profile"/> Another character—Herbert Methley—is a combination of H. G. Wells and D. H. Lawrence, according to Byatt.<ref name="The Saturday Profile"/> The novel also features Rupert Brooke, Emma Goldman, Auguste Rodin, George Bernard Shaw, Virginia Woolf and Oscar Wilde, all appearing as themselves.<ref name="The Saturday Profile">Template:Cite news</ref> Byatt initially intended to title the book The Hedgehog, the White Goose and the Mad March Hare.<ref name="The Saturday Profile"/>

She wrote at her home in Putney, West London, and at another house in the Cévennes in Southern France, where she spent her summers.<ref name = Telegraph/><ref name="The Paris Review">Template:Cite journal</ref><ref name="Cercles" /> She did not write her fiction on a computer, she did so by hand, though she had deployed a computer for non-fiction articles.<ref name="The Paris Review" /> According to a 1991 unpublished interview with the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Byatt said she began her writing day at around 10 a.m., prompting herself by reading something easy and then something harder: "And then after a bit if I read something difficult that's really interesting I get this itch to start writing. So what I like to do is to write from about half past twelve, one, through to about four". At this point, she said, she would begin reading again.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

CriticismEdit

Byatt wrote two critical studies of Dame Iris Murdoch, who was a friend, mentor and another significant influence on her own writing.<ref name="Cercles"/> They were titled Degrees of Freedom: The Early Novels of Iris Murdoch (1965) and Iris Murdoch: A Critical Study (1976).<ref name="British Council: Literature"/> Byatt also described Murdoch's husband John Bayley's decision to publish a memoir of his time with her as "wicked" and "unforgivable", saying: "I knew her enough to know that she would have hated it... it's had a horrible effect on how people feel about her and see her and think about her."<ref name="Leith 2009"/>

Byatt's other critical studies include Wordsworth and Coleridge in Their Time (1970).<ref name="British Council: Literature"/> 2001's Portraits in Fiction is about painting in novels, and features references to Emile Zola, Marcel Proust and Iris Murdoch; Byatt had earlier touched upon this subject in a 2000 lecture she delivered at the National Portrait Gallery in London.<ref name="British Council: Literature"/>

Byatt had been a public encourager of the new young generation of British writers, including Philip Hensher (Kitchen Venom),<ref name="Leith 2009"/><ref name="Cercles"/> Robert Irwin (Exquisite Corpse),<ref name="Cercles"/> A. L. Kennedy,<ref name="Cercles"/> Lawrence Norfolk,<ref name="Leith 2009"/><ref name="Cercles"/> David Mitchell (Ghostwritten),<ref name="Leith 2009"/><ref name="Cercles"/> Ali Smith (Hotel World),<ref name="Leith 2009"/><ref name="Cercles"/> Zadie Smith (White Teeth)<ref name="Cercles"/> and Adam Thirlwell,<ref name="Leith 2009"/> saying in 2009 that she was "not entirely disinterested, because I wish there to be a literary world in which people are not writing books only about people's feelings ... all the ones I like write also about ideas".<ref name="Leith 2009"/> She contrasted some of those preferences with the work of Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan and Graham Swift—then added, "In fact I admire all four of those writers... they don't only do people's feelings... nevertheless it's become ossified".<ref name="Leith 2009"/> Norfolk she described in 2003 as "the best of the young novelists now writing".<ref name="Cercles">Template:Cite journal</ref> She also spoke of her admiration for American writer Helen DeWitt's book The Last Samurai.<ref name="Cercles"/> Hensher, who counts Byatt as a friend, said: "She's very unusual for an English person, in that she's quite suspicious of comedy. With most people, sooner or later, every intellectual position comes down to a joke—it never does with her."<ref name="Leith 2009"/>

Byatt was a judge on many literary award panels, including the Betty Trask Award, the David Higham Prize for Fiction,<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> the Hawthornden Prize and the Booker.<ref name="British Council: Literature"/> She also wrote for the media, including for The Times Literary Supplement, British journal Prospect and newspapers The Guardian, The Independent and The Sunday Times.<ref name="British Council: Literature"/><ref>Template:Cite news</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Awards and honoursEdit

File:A.S.Byatt2011.jpg
Byatt, pictured in Amsterdam in 2011

Byatt was mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature.<ref name="Nobel 2012" />

HonoursEdit

Byatt was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 1990 New Year Honours,<ref>Template:London Gazette</ref> and was promoted to Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE), "for services to Literature", in Elizabeth II's 1999 Birthday Honours.<ref>Template:London Gazette</ref><ref name="2009 Booker Prize shortlist" />

She was also awarded:

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  • 1999: Honorary Fellow, Newnham College, Cambridge<ref name="Honorary Fellows Newnham College, Cambridge" /><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

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LiteraryEdit

  • 1986: PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award, for Still Life<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

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  • 1998: Mythopoeic Award for Adult Literature, for The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

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  • 2002: Shakespeare Prize (Germany)<ref name="British Council: Literature" />
  • 2009: Blue Metropolis International Literary Grand Prix<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

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MembershipsEdit

  • 1987–1988: Kingman Committee of Inquiry into the teaching of English Language, (Department of Education and Science)<ref name="British Council: Literature"/>
  • 1984–1988: Management Committee, Society of Authors (Deputy chairman, 1986, Chairman, 1986–1988)<ref name="British Council: Literature"/>
  • 1993–1998: Board, British Council (Member of Literature Advisory Panel, 1990–1998)<ref name="British Council: Literature"/>
  • 2014: American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Foreign Honorary Member<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

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WorksEdit

NovelsEdit

The following books form a tetralogy known as The Quartet: The Virgin in the Garden (1978), Still Life (1985), Babel Tower (1996) and A Whistling Woman (2002).<ref name="British Council: Literature"/>

Short story collectionsEdit

  • 1987: Sugar and Other Stories, Chatto & Windus<ref name="British Council: Literature"/>
  • 1993: The Matisse Stories, Chatto & Windus<ref name="British Council: Literature"/>
  • 1994: The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye, Chatto & Windus<ref name="British Council: Literature"/>
  • 1998: Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice, Chatto & Windus<ref name="British Council: Literature"/>
  • 2003: Little Black Book of Stories, Chatto & Windus<ref name="British Council: Literature"/>
  • 2021: Medusa's Ankles: Selected Stories, Chatto & Windus<ref name="British Council: Literature"/>

NovellasEdit

  • 1992: Angels and Insects, Chatto & Windus; comprises a pair of novellas:<ref name="British Council: Literature"/>
    • Morpho Eugenia<ref name="British Council: Literature"/>
    • The Conjugial Angel<ref name="British Council: Literature"/>

Essays and biographiesEdit

  • 1965: Degrees of Freedom: The Early Novels of Iris Murdoch, Chatto & Windus<ref name="British Council: Literature"/>
  • 1970: Wordsworth and Coleridge in their Time, Nelson<ref name="British Council: Literature"/>
  • 1976: Iris Murdoch: A Critical Study, Longman<ref name="British Council: Literature"/>
  • 1989: Unruly Times: Wordsworth and Coleridge, Poetry and Life, Hogarth Press<ref name="British Council: Literature"/>
  • 1991: Passions of the Mind: Selected Writings, Chatto & Windus<ref name="British Council: Literature"/>
  • 1995: Imagining Characters: Six Conversations about Women Writers (with Ignes Sodre), Chatto & Windus<ref name="British Council: Literature"/>
  • 2000: On Histories and Stories: Selected Essays, Chatto & Windus<ref name="British Council: Literature"/>
  • 2001: Portraits in Fiction, Chatto & Windus<ref name="British Council: Literature"/>
  • 2016: Peacock & Vine: On William Morris and Mariano Fortuny, Knopf Template:ISBN<ref name="British Council: Literature"/>

Texts editedEdit

  • 1989: George Eliot: Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings (editor with Nicholas Warren), Penguin<ref name="British Council: Literature"/>
  • 1995: New Writing Volume 4 (editor with Alan Hollinghurst), Vintage<ref name="British Council: Literature"/>
  • 1997: New Writing Volume 6 (editor with Peter Porter), Vintage<ref name="British Council: Literature"/>
  • 1998: Oxford Book of English Short Stories (editor), Oxford University Press<ref name="British Council: Literature"/>
  • 2001: The Bird Hand Book (with photographs by Victor Schrager), Graphis Inc. (New York)<ref name="British Council: Literature"/>

See alsoEdit

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ReferencesEdit

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Further readingEdit

  • Gorski, Hedwig (2018). The Riddle of Correspondences in A. S. Byatt's Possession: A Romance with H. D.'s Trilogy. New Orleans: Jadzia Books. Template:ISBN.
  • Hicks, Elizabeth (2010). The Still Life in the Fiction of A. S. Byatt. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Template:ISBN.
  • Mundler, Helen E. (2003). Intertextualité dans l'œuvre d'A. S. Byatt (Intertextuality in the work of A. S. Byatt). Paris: Harmattan. Template:ISBN.
  • Mundler, Helen E. (2007–2008). Template:"'Time to Murder and Create?' The Bible as Intertext in A. S. Byatt's Elementals: Stories of Fire and IceTemplate:-" Template:Registration required. FAAAM, no. IV "Text & Genesis": 65–77.

External linksEdit

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Audio interviews and readings

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