A.S. Byatt

Dame Antonia Susan Duffy (24 August 1936 – 16 November 2023) was an English novelist and poet. She is daughter of His Honour John Frederick Drabble, QC and late Kathleen Marie Bloor and was married to Peter Duffy. She was more known as A. S. Byatt.

Easton Press A.S. Byatt books

  Possession - signed modern classic - 2004

Franklin Library A.S. Byatt books

  Angels and Insects - signed first edition - 1993
  Babel Tower - signed first edition - 1996  

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Author A.S. Byatt

Byatt was educated at The Mount School, York, Newnham College Cambridge, Bryn Mawr in Pennsylvania, USA and Somerville College, Oxford, though her research grant to the latter institution (dependent on single status) ended with her first marriage to Ian Byatt (later Sir Ian Byatt) in 1959. Her younger sister is the novelist Margaret Drabble and their younger sister is the art historian Helen Langdon.

She lectured in the Department of Extra-Mural Studies of London University (1962-71), the Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design and from 1972 to 1983 at University College London.

Byatt's first novel, The Shadow of the Sun, the story of a young girl growing up in the shadow of a dominant father, was published in 1964 and was followed by The Game (1967), a study of the relationship between two sisters. The Virgin in the Garden (1978) is the first book in a quartet about the members of a Yorkshire family. The story continues in Still Life (1985), which won the PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award, and Babel Tower (1996). The fourth (and final) novel in the quartet is A Whistling Woman (2002). The quartet describes mid-20th-century Britain and Frederica's life as a young female intellectual studying at Cambridge at a time when women were heavily outnumbered by men at that University, and later, a divorcée with a young son making a new life in London. Like Babel Tower, A Whistling Woman covers the '60s and dips into the utopian and revolutionary dreams of the time. The Matisse Stories, (1993) featured three stories, each describing a painting by Henri Matisse that inspired Byatt, each the tale of an initially smaller crisis that shows the long-present unravelling in the protagonists' lives.

 

Possession, her best known novel, which parallels the emerging relationship of two contemporary academics with the past of two (fictional) nineteenth century poets whom they are researching, won the Booker Prize in 1990.

Also known for her short stories, Byatt has been influenced by Henry James and George Eliot as well as Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, and Robert Browning, in merging realism and naturalism with fantasy. In her quartet of novels about mid-century England, she is clearly indebted to D. H. Lawrence, particularly by The Rainbow and Women in Love. Iris Murdoch about whose early works Byatt wrote a book of criticism, was also an influence. There and in other works, Byatt alludes to, and builds upon, themes from Romantic and Victorian literature. Byatt conceives of fantasy as an alternative to rather than an escape from everyday life, and often it is difficult to tell if what is fantastic in her work is actually the irruption of psychosis. More recent books by Byatt have brought to fore her interest in science, particularly cognitive science and zoology. Two of her works have been adapted into motion pictures: Possession (2002) and Angels & Insects (1995).

She has written for the British intellectual journal Prospect and The Guardian. She was awarded a CBE in 1990, then a DBE in 1999.

Byatt died at home on 16 November 2023, at the age of 87.

A.S. Byatt books in order

The Shadow of the Sun (1964)
Degrees of Freedom: The Early Novels of Iris Murdoch (1965)
The Game Chatto & Windus (1967)
Wordsworth and Coleridge in their Time (1970)
Iris Murdoch: A Critical Study (1976)
The Virgin in the Garden (1978)
Still Life Chatto & Windus (1985)
Sugar and Other Stories (1987)
Unruly Times: Wordsworth and Coleridge, Poetry and Life (1989)
Possession: A Romance (1990)
Passions of the Mind: Selected Writings (1991)
Angels & Insects (1992)
The Matisse Stories (1993)
The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye (1994)
Imagining Characters: Six Conversations about Women Writers (with Ignes Sodre 1995)
Babel Tower (1996)
Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice (1998)
On Histories and Stories: Selected Essays (2000)
The Biographer's Tale (2000)
Portraits in Fiction (2001)
The Bird Hand Book (2001)
A Whistling Woman (2002)
Little Black Book of Stories (2003)
The Children's Book (2009)
Ragnarok: The End of the Gods (2011)
Peacock & Vine: On William Morris and Mariano Fortuny (2016)
The Women Writers Handbook (2020)
Medusa's Ankles: Selected Stories (2021)

 

Source and additional information: A.S. Byatt