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.
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.
Mackenzie, Suzie. “Mothers and daughters”. Guardian Unlimited.
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 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
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...
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
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
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...
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
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
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
Margaret Atwood
Novelist and critic Aritha Van Herk
found this volume less playful than its predecessors,a dry and dire collection . . . . Atwood as Cassandra, wailing her prophecy in the ear of a deaf...
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
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...
Literary responses
Pat Barker
With this novel PB
won the Guardian Fiction Prize. A. S. Byatt
wrote that the book provided a new vision of what the First World War did to human beings, male and female, soldiers and...
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.