A. S. Byatt

Standard Name: Byatt, A. S.
Birth Name: Antonia Susan Drabble
Married Name: Antonia Susan Byatt
Married Name: Antonia Susan Duffy
ASB , publishing in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, is predominantly a novelist of ideas. Her works (stories and criticism as well as novels) are intellectually demanding, typically spinning a complex web of literary and cultural allusions. She likes depicting extreme personal situations: critic Hilary Spurling has said she is adept at rendering disintegration.
qtd. in
Byatt, A. S. The Matisse Stories. Chatto and Windus, 1993.
prelims
Colour photograph of A.S. Byatt, shown from the shoulders up. She is wearing a black fleece sweater with a high neck, zipped almost to the top, with a grey cardigan over top. Her hair is short and grey and she stands against the background of a street.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Education Mary Gawthorpe
From St Michael's MG , aged thirteen, won a scholarship to a local high school, but it was awarded without maintenance. (The dictation in the scholarship exam had been about the migration of terns, a...
Family and Intimate relationships F. Tennyson Jesse
Her grandmother Emily Tennyson , the poet's sister, had been engaged to his great friend Arthur Hallam before she married FTJ 's grandfather years after Hallam's death.
A. S. Byatt has used FTJ as narrator...
Family and Intimate relationships Margaret Drabble
Novelist A. S. Byatt is MD 's older sister. Drabble has observed, about being a younger sister: You are always behind. No matter how hard you try. She will always be older, cleverer, in higher heels.
qtd. in
Mackenzie, Suzie. “Mothers and daughters”. Guardian Unlimited, 16 Dec. 2000.
Intertextuality and Influence Margaret Kennedy
A later novelist, Barbara Pym , thought of The Heroes of Clone as pattern for a fiction setting side by side what researchers and biographers write of a person's life and then what really did...
Literary responses Elaine Feinstein
A. S. Byatt called Mother's Girla major achievement.
Feinstein, Elaine. It Goes with the Territory. Alma, 2013.
245
Reviewers tended to express faint disappointment with All You Need, perhaps because they were expecting something different.
Literary responses Kamila Shamsie
A Library Journal review called the novel a beautifully-written tale that is equal parts A. S. Byatt -style mystery and mother-daughter saga and the compelling angle that post-9/11 Pakistani politics add to themes of responsibility...
Literary responses Margaret Atwood
Novelist and critic Aritha Van Herk found this volume less playful than its predecessors,a dry and dire collection . . . . Atwood as Cassandra, wailing her prophecy in the ear of a deaf...
Literary responses Pat Barker
With this novel PB won the Guardian Fiction Prize. A. S. Byatt wrote that the book provided a new vision of what the First World War did to human beings, male and female, soldiers and...
Literary responses Iris Murdoch
The first monograph on IM was that of 1965 by A. S. Byatt , who faulted her for the inconsistency of her fiction with her expressed philosophic views. This study provoked further academic discussion, and...
Literary responses Penelope Fitzgerald
This volume prompted A. S. Byatt to call its author Jane Austen 's nearest heir.
qtd. in
“Flamingo Press advertisement for ’The Means of Escape’ by Penelope Fitzgerald”. London Review of Books, 19 Oct. 2000, p. 21.
21
Literary responses Barbara Pym
Initial comment included reviews or articles by A. S. Byatt and Marghanita Laski .
Allen, Orphia Jane. Barbara Pym: Writing a Life. Scarecrow Press, 1994.
198, 199
Orphia Jane Allen considers this work a thinly developed
Allen, Orphia Jane. Barbara Pym: Writing a Life. Scarecrow Press, 1994.
40
but effectively ironic, witty view of academia. Anne Wyatt-Brown
Literary responses Barbara Pym
Pym is not one of those women writers whose stock has risen through feminist re-evaluation. Five years after the influential Times Literary Supplement article was published, Penelope Lively wrote, I am always surprised that the...
Literary responses Willa Cather
WC 's own later comments on this book were somewhat grudging. It was conventional, she said, carefully arranged but unnecessary and superficial.
Cather, Willa. On Writing. Editor Tennant, Stephen, Alfred A. Knopf, 1949.
92
When she wrote it she thought it a great thing that the...
Literary responses Georgette Heyer
Joanna Cannan (a friend of GH ) based a character on her in No Walls of Jasper (1930) who is described in Heyeresque style. She is not beautiful, not pretty; her nose was too large...
Literary responses Willa Cather
H. L. Mencken called this a book of very fine achievement and of even finer promise.
qtd. in
Cather, Willa. My Ántonia. Editor Urgo, Joseph R., Broadview Press, 2003.
297
In 1979 A. S. Byatt wrote that her own personal material gave WCa way of developing a...

Timeline

By late October 1920: Flora Murray wrote about her war experience...

Building item

By late October 1920

Flora Murray wrote about her war experience in Women as Army Surgeons: Being the History of the Women's Hospital Corps in Paris, Wimereux and Endell Street, September 1914-October 1919.
“Back—due to popular demand”. The Guardian, 3 May 2008, pp. Review 4 - 6.
4
TLS Centenary Archive Centenary Archive [1902-2012]. http://www.gale.com/c/the-times-literary-supplement-historical-archive.
980 (28 October 1920): 701

1977: The Guardian Award for Children's Books went...

Women writers item

1977

The Guardian Award for Children's Books went to Charmed Life by Diana Wynne Jones , about an ambitious young enchantress holed up in a castle,
Ashby, Melanie. “Diana Wynne Jones”. Mslexia, No. 26, July 2005, pp. 46-8.
48
which, she says, revisits the trope of the isolated...

Texts

Byatt, A. S. A Whistling Woman. Chatto, 2002.
Byatt, A. S. A. S. Byatt. http://www.asbyatt.com/.
Byatt, A. S. “An exciting event this year has been the publication. ”. The Times Literary Supplement, No. 5670, p. 9.
Byatt, A. S. Angels and Insects. Chatto and Windus, 1992.
Byatt, A. S. “Arachne”. Ovid Metamorphosed, edited by Philip Terry, Chatto and Windus, 2000, pp. 131-57.
Byatt, A. S. Babel Tower. Chatto and Windus, 1996.
Byatt, A. S. Degrees of Freedom. Chatto and Windus, 1965.
Byatt, A. S. Elementals. Chatto and Windus, 1998.
Byatt, A. S. “Freedom won’t wait”. guardian.co.uk.
Byatt, A. S., and Ignês Sodré. Imagining Characters. Chatto and Windus, 1995.
Byatt, A. S. Indexers and Indexes in Fact and Fiction. Editor Bell, Hazel K., University of Toronto, 2001.
Byatt, A. S., and Willa Cather. “Introduction”. A Lost Lady, Virago, 2000, p. v - xiv.
Byatt, A. S., and Penelope Fitzgerald. “Introduction”. So I Have Thought of You, edited by Terence Dooley and Terence Dooley, HarperCollins Fourth Estate, 2008.
Byatt, A. S. Passions of the Mind. Chatto and Windus, 1991.
Byatt, A. S. “Porcelain ghosts”. The Guardian, pp. Review 16 - 17.
Byatt, A. S. Possession. Chatto and Windus, 1990.
Byatt, A. S. Ragnarok: The End of the Gods. Canongate, 2011.
Byatt, A. S. Shadow of a Sun. Chatto and Windus, 1964.
Byatt, A. S. Still Life. Chatto and Windus, 1985.
Byatt, A. S. Sugar and Other Stories. Chatto and Windus, 1987.
Byatt, A. S. et al. “The art of portraying the everyday”. Guardian Weekly, p. 39.
Byatt, A. S. The Biographer’s Tale. Chatto and Windus, 2000.
Byatt, A. S. The Children’s Book. Chatto and Windus, 2009.
Byatt, A. S. The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye. Chatto and Windus, 1994.
Byatt, A. S. The Game. Chatto and Windus, 1967.