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, 1993.
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
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.
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. 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 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 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.
RF feels that in Jocasta's Death she has achieved...
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. Greene, RichardEditor , Alfred A. Knopf, 2007.
317
A. S. Byatt admired the mocking and sinister games played by the...
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, 1981.
76
Reviews were a chorus of praise, with different commentators taking different views. A. S. Byatt saw the subject as...
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, 2013.
245
Reviewers tended to express faint disappointment with All You Need, perhaps because they were expecting something different.
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 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...
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...

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.
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...