A. S. Byatt

24 August 1936

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.

qtd. in

Byatt, A. S. The Matisse Stories. Chatto and Windus, 1993.

prelims

Full profile

Connections

Connections Sort descending	Author name	Excerpt
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...
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. qtd. in Mackenzie, Suzie. “Mothers and daughters”. Guardian Unlimited, 16 Dec. 2000.
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...
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	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, 1990. 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, 2003, 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...
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, 2007. 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, 1981–2025, Numerous volumes. 76 Reviews were a chorus of praise, with different commentators taking different views. A. S. Byatt saw the subject as...
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	Ali Smith	A. S. Byatt praised Smith's novel as sharp, witty, innovatory and moving, qtd. in Byatt, A. S. “An exciting event this year has been the publication. ”. The Times Literary Supplement, No. 5670, 2 Dec. 2011, p. 9. 9 while Lionel Shriver , reviewing for the Financial Times, was especially taken with the photo researcher's story, particularly the hilariously awkward...
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
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	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, 29 June 2009.
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, 3 May 2008, pp. Review 4 - 6. 4 A year later she...
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	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. qtd. in The Poetry Archive. 2005, http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/home.do. RF feels that in Jocasta's Death she has achieved...

Timeline

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.

“Back—due to popular demand”. The Guardian, 3 May 2008, pp. Review 4 - 6.

TLS Centenary Archive Centenary Archive [1902-2012]. http://www.gale.com/c/the-times-literary-supplement-historical-archive.

980 (28 October 1920): 701

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, July 2005, pp. 46-8.

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. et al. “The art of portraying the everyday”. Guardian Weekly, p. 39.

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.