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.
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.
Mackenzie, Suzie. “Mothers and daughters”. Guardian Unlimited.
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 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.
Literary responses Willa Cather
This novel won the Prix Femina Américain.
Blain, Virginia, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy, editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.
Urgo, Joseph R., and Willa Cather. “Introduction. Willa Cather: A Brief Chronology. A Note on the Text”. My Ántonia, edited by Joseph R. Urgo and Joseph R. Urgo, Broadview Press, 2003, pp. 9 - 39.
37
It was praised in the Saturday Review of Literature by Wilbur Cross , Governor of Connecticut, and the same journal published a letter of acknowledgement from the...
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.
Lindblad, Ishrat. Pamela Hansford Johnson. Twayne, 1982.
125
It reminded him of George Eliot : he praised...
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, pp. Review 4 - 6.
4
A year later she...
Literary responses Monica Dickens
It was this year that A. S. Byatt registered in print her deep admiration of MD (who, for her part, thought Byatt underestimated the humour in her books).
“The Times Digital Archive 1785-2007”. Thompson Gale: The Times Digital Archive.
(2 November 1970): 12
Literary responses Ali Smith
A. S. Byatt praised Smith's novel as sharp, witty, innovatory and moving,
Byatt, A. S. “An exciting event this year has been the publication...”. The Times Literary Supplement, No. 5670, p. 9.
9
while Lionel Shriver , reviewing for the Financial Times, was especially taken with the photo researcher's story, particularly the hilariously awkward...
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.
The Poetry Archive.
RF feels that in Jocasta's Death she has achieved...
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 Muriel Spark
Graham Greene offered the same accolade as for her previous novel, recognizing its disappointing reception with: What fools the reviewers have been.
Greene, Graham. Graham Greene. A Life in Letters. Greene, RichardEditor , Alfred A. Knopf, 2007.
317
A. S. Byatt admired the mocking and sinister games played by the...
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 Muriel Spark
This novel was nominated for the Booker McConnell Prize in the year of its publication.
Contemporary Authors: New Revision Series. Gale Research, 1981.
76
Reviews were a chorus of praise, with different commentators taking different views. A. S. Byatt saw the subject as...

Timeline

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.
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, pp. 46 - 8.
48
which, she says, revisits the trope of the isolated...