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

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.