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.
The first monograph on IM
was that of 1965 by A. S. Byatt
, who faulted her for the inconsistency of her fiction with her expressed philosophic views. This study provoked further academic discussion, and...
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
Alice Munro
After it won the O. Henry Prize (in the first year in which Canadians were eligible for this award) Munro described the genesis of the title story in an actual occurrence where a woman and...
Literary responses
Alice Munro
Among a rich harvest of prizes and honours, AM
won the Giller Prize in both 1998 and 2004. In 2002 an Alice Munro Literary Garden, just beside the museum, was dedicated in Wingham, Ontario...
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...
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
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...
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
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.
Johnson, Pamela Hansford. Important to Me. Macmillan; Scribner.
111
A reprint of 1987 has...
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.
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...
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...
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...
