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.
prelims

Connections

Connections Author name Sort descending Excerpt
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 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...
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...
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.
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.
Cather, Willa. My Ántonia. Editor Urgo, Joseph R., Broadview Press.
297
In 1979 A. S. Byatt wrote that her own personal material gave WCa way of developing a...
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...
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.
cover
than which it...
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...
Literary responses Willa Cather
This novel won the Prix Femina Américain.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
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, 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...
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
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...
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
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.
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...
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. http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/home.do.
RF feels that in Jocasta's Death she has achieved...

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.