Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
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.
EJH
's assignments in 1974 included, as well as the Rose Kennedy
interview, acting as one of the three judges of the Booker Prize. (Another judge this year was A. S. Byatt
.) Howard received...
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.
Johnson, Pamela Hansford. Important to Me. Macmillan; Scribner, 1974.
111
A reprint of 1987 has...
Publishing
Monica Dickens
She used to get up at about 4 a.m. and write until the baby woke. The title stemmed in part from the windiness of Cape Cod (where she was living), in part from her heroine's...
Reception
Anita Brookner
This book provoked an unusual article from journalist Mark Lawson
, centred less on Brookner than on his own response. I have mocked her dessicated sentences, characterless protagonists and action-free narratives, he wrote. The gist...
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Reception
Willa Cather
A. S. Byatt
believes that although in the late 1920s WCwas considered one of America's best living writers, admired for her innovative, American content, this changed in the 1930s. Cather was then and later...
Reception
Muriel Spark
Graham Greene
wrote to tell Spark that this was her best book since Memento Mori (as he was to do with several later titles as well).
Greene, Graham. Graham Greene. A Life in Letters. Editor Greene, Richard, Alfred A. Knopf, 2007.
309-10
Reviews were mixed, many sounding baffled. While admirers...
Reception
Olivia Manning
OM
's biographers note that a number of reference sources make no mention of this novel. At round about the same date she was distressed to find herself omitted from Who's Who in Twentieth Century...
Reception
Ruth Fainlight
RF
has drawn appreciative comment from fellow poets and writers like Helen Dunmore
, A. S. Byatt
, and Elaine Feinstein
(who has written that in a time when every poet is wooed by the...
Reception
Evelyn Sharp
In 2009 A. S. Byatt
hoped for the publication of Sharp's diaries
Byatt, A. S. “Freedom won’t wait”. guardian.co.uk, 29 June 2009.
Textual Features
Willa Cather
A. S. Byatt
finds in this volume a mournful Arcadian tone, thinly ecstatic, and owing much to Swinburne
and Housman
.
Byatt, A. S., and Willa Cather. “Introduction”. A Lost Lady, Virago, 2000, p. v - xiv.
v
Textual Features
Margaret Drabble
This is the first of several MD
novels to feature a relationship between sisters which critics have seen as based on the author's relationship with her sister A. S. Byatt
. The heroine, Sarah Bennett...
Textual Production
Iris Murdoch
IM
spoke with her younger fellow-novelist A. S. Byatt
about aspects of her craft, in an interview for BBC
Radio Four which is now available on the internet.
“BBC Audio Interviews”. BBC Radio 4.
Textual Production
Penelope Fitzgerald
A volume of PF
's letters appeared in print in 2008, edited by her son-in-law Terence Dooley
and titled So I Have Thought of You, with a preface by A. S. Byatt
. The...
