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
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 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 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 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 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 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 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
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 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
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 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...
Literary responses Pamela Hansford Johnson
This novel marked a step forward in the public valuation of PHJ . Walter Allen called it one of the best novels of our time.
qtd. in
Lindblad, Ishrat. Pamela Hansford Johnson. Twayne, 1982.
125
It reminded him of George Eliot : he praised...
Literary responses Willa Cather
This novel poses a challenge both to contemporary and to later conventions of gender morality—a fact reflected in the tendency of commentators to liken it to Flaubert 's Madame Bovary,
Cather, Willa. A Lost Lady. Virago, 2000.
cover
than which it...
Occupation Hilary Mantel
After leaving the University of Sheffield , HM spent some time as a social worker at a geriatric hospital, followed by a period of retail industry employment.
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
271
She worked at two menial jobs in...

Timeline

No timeline events available.

Texts

Byatt, A. S. The Matisse Stories. Chatto and Windus, 1993.
Byatt, A. S., editor. The Oxford Book of English Short Stories. Oxford University Press, 1998.
Byatt, A. S. The Virgin in the Garden. Chatto and Windus, 1978.