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.
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...
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.
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...
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...
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...
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
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...
