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
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
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...
Literary responses Elaine Feinstein
A. S. Byatt called Mother's Girla major achievement.
Feinstein, Elaine. It Goes with the Territory. Alma.
245
Reviewers tended to express faint disappointment with All You Need, perhaps because they were expecting something different.
Occupation Penelope Fitzgerald
After the war PF worked chiefly as a journalist and teacher. The story goes that she adopted elaborate procedures to conceal her identity when submitting work to Punch, which was under her father's editorship...
Literary responses Penelope Fitzgerald
This volume prompted A. S. Byatt to call its author Jane Austen 's nearest heir.
“Flamingo Press advertisement for ’The Means of Escape’ by Penelope Fitzgerald”. London Review of Books, p. 21.
21
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...
Reception Ford Madox Ford
Writers as different as Ruth Rendell and A. S. Byatt belong to the Ford Madox Ford Society , founded in 1997.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
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...
Literary responses Georgette Heyer
Joanna Cannan (a friend of GH ) based a character on her in No Walls of Jasper (1930) who is described in Heyeresque style. She is not beautiful, not pretty; her nose was too large...
Occupation Elizabeth Jane Howard
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...
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...
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.
125
It reminded him of George Eliot : he praised...
Publishing Pamela Hansford Johnson
PHJ finished this work in the gracious environment of Middletown, Connecticut, where she and her husband were Fellows at the Center for Advanced Studies at Wesleyan University .
Johnson, Pamela Hansford. Important to Me. Macmillan; Scribner.
111
A reprint of 1987 has...
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...
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...
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.
271
She worked at two menial jobs in...

Timeline

No timeline events available.

Texts

Byatt, A. S., editor. The Oxford Book of English Short Stories. Oxford University Press, 1998.
Byatt, A. S. The Virgin in the Garden. Chatto and Windus, 1978.