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 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.
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...
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 Hilary Mantel
HM already features in critical surveys of the modern British novel, such as that by Nick Rennison , 2004. A. S. Byatt discusses her (among writers of both sexes including predecessors Elizabeth Bowen and Muriel Spark
Literary responses Alice Munro
The Selected Stories was hailed as an important literary event, and produced particularly interesting reviews from A. S. Byatt and John Updike . Byatt wrote that Munro was the equal of Chekhov or de Maupassant
Literary responses Evelyn Sharp
In the early twenty-first century A. S. Byatt discovered ES when, working on her novel The Children's Book, she asked scholar Jack Zipes for links between fairy stories and turn-of-the-century socialism and he mentioned Sharp.
Byatt, A. S. “Freedom won’t wait”. guardian.co.uk, 29 June 2009.
Literary responses Alice Munro
After it won the O. Henry Prize (in the first year in which Canadians were eligible for this award) Munro described the genesis of the title story in an actual occurrence where a woman and...
Literary responses Ruth Fainlight
A. S. Byatt is quoted by the publishers of this book saying that RF 's poems give us truly new visions of usual and mysterious events.
qtd. in
The Poetry Archive. 2005, http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/home.do.
RF feels that in Jocasta's Death she has achieved...
Literary responses Evelyn Sharp
A. S. Byatt in early 2008 found herself interested and excited by this book (then about to be reprinted). She described Sharp as perspicacious, witty and a very good writer.
“Back—due to popular demand”. The Guardian, 3 May 2008, pp. Review 4 - 6.
4
A year later she...
Literary responses Alice Munro
Among a rich harvest of prizes and honours, AM won the Giller Prize in both 1998 and 2004. In 2002 an Alice Munro Literary Garden, just beside the museum, was dedicated in Wingham, Ontario...
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 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 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...

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.