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
Textual Production Timberlake Wertenbaker
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 Marina Warner
John Ashbery , Gilbert Adair , Terence Cave , Ranjit Bolt , and A. S. Byatt did the translations. A reprint of 2004 modifies the subtitle.
Warner, Marina, editor. Wonder Tales: Six Stories of Enchantment. Chatto and Windus.
index
Moseley, Merritt, editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 194. Gale Research.
194: 286
OCLC WorldCat. http://www.oclc.org/firstsearch/content/worldcat/. Accessed 1999.
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...
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. Editor Greene, Richard, Alfred A. Knopf.
317
A. S. Byatt admired the mocking and sinister games played by the...
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.
76
Reviews were a chorus of praise, with different commentators taking different views. A. S. Byatt saw the subject as...
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...
Violence Elizabeth Siddal
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...
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 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...
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.
Literary responses Kamila Shamsie
A Library Journal review called the novel a beautifully-written tale that is equal parts A. S. Byatt -style mystery and mother-daughter saga and the compelling angle that post-9/11 Pakistani politics add to themes of responsibility...
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...
Literary responses Barbara Pym
Initial comment included reviews or articles by A. S. Byatt and Marghanita Laski .
Allen, Orphia Jane. Barbara Pym: Writing a Life. Scarecrow Press.
198, 199
Orphia Jane Allen considers this work a thinly developed
Allen, Orphia Jane. Barbara Pym: Writing a Life. Scarecrow Press.
40
but effectively ironic, witty view of academia. Anne Wyatt-Brown
Literary responses Barbara Pym
Pym is not one of those women writers whose stock has risen through feminist re-evaluation. Five years after the influential Times Literary Supplement article was published, Penelope Lively wrote, I am always surprised that the...
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.

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.