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.
qtd. in
Byatt, A. S. The Matisse Stories. Chatto and Windus, 1993.
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...
Johnson, Pamela Hansford. Important to Me. Macmillan; Scribner, 1974.
111
A reprint of 1987 has...
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...
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
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...
Reception
Muriel Spark
Graham Greene
wrote to tell Spark that this was her best book since Memento Mori (as he was to do with several later titles as well).
Greene, Graham. Graham Greene. A Life in Letters. Editor Greene, Richard, Alfred A. Knopf, 2007.
309-10
Reviews were mixed, many sounding baffled. While admirers...
Reception
Olivia Manning
OM
's biographers note that a number of reference sources make no mention of this novel. At round about the same date she was distressed to find herself omitted from Who's Who in Twentieth Century...
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...
Reception
Evelyn Sharp
In 2009 A. S. Byatt
hoped for the publication of Sharp's diaries
Byatt, A. S. “Freedom won’t wait”. guardian.co.uk, 29 June 2009.
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...
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...
Textual Features
Willa Cather
A. S. Byatt
finds in this volume a mournful Arcadian tone, thinly ecstatic, and owing much to Swinburne
and Housman
.
Byatt, A. S., and Willa Cather. “Introduction”. A Lost Lady, Virago, 2000, p. v - xiv.
v
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...
Textual Production
Timberlake Wertenbaker
Writing for these genres as well as for the stage, TW
often revisits and reshapes the work of earlier writers. She wrote the screenplay for The Children, a Film Four International
production (1990) adapted...
