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.
Byatt, A. S. The Matisse Stories. Chatto and Windus.
As Marsh
puts it, this deeply transgressive act has since then been a symbol of religious, poetic and personal violation.
Marsh, Jan. The Legend of Elizabeth Siddal. Quartet Books.
21
Rossetti himself justified his action to Swinburne
as follows: no one so much as...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Michèle Roberts
This volume brings together pieces from various occasions and venues. In them MR
discusses many of her favourite topics—the food, sex and god named in her title, the second and third often involving the relation...
Writing for these genres as well as for the stage, TW
often revisits and reshapes the work of earlier writers. She wrote the screenplay for The Children, a Film Four International
production (1990) adapted...
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...
Textual Production
Willa Cather
The title is explained by her prefatory note (called sour by Byatt
), which says that nobody under forty will be interested in reading her opinions, because the world broke in two in 1922 or...
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, 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...
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
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.
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
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.
309-10
Reviews were mixed, many sounding baffled. While admirers...
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.
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, 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. 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.
Byatt, A. S. The Matisse Stories. Chatto and Windus, 1993.