Dame A. S. Byatt | |
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.jpg) Byatt in 2007 | |
| Born | Antonia Susan Drabble (1936-08-24)24 August 1936 Sheffield, West Riding of Yorkshire, England |
| Died | 16 November 2023(2023-11-16) (aged 87) London, England |
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| Alma mater | |
| Period | 1964–2016 |
| Spouses | |
| Children | 4 |
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| Website | |
asbyatt | |
Dame Antonia Susan Duffy (née Drabble; 24 August 1936 – 16 November 2023), known professionally by her former married name,A. S. Byatt (/ˈbaɪ.ət/BY-ət),[1] was an English critic, novelist, poet and short-story writer. Her books have been translated into more than thirty languages.[2][3]
After attending theUniversity of Cambridge, she married in 1959 and moved toDurham. It was during Byatt's time at university that she began working on her first two novels, subsequently published byChatto & Windus asShadow of a Sun (1964; reprinted in 1991 with its originally intended title,The Shadow of the Sun) andThe Game (1967). Byatt took a teaching job in 1972 to help pay for the education of her son. In the same week she accepted, adrunk driver killed her son as he walked home from school. He was 11 years of age. Byatt spent a symbolic 11 years teaching, then began full-time writing in 1983.The Virgin in the Garden (1978) was the first ofThe Quartet,[4] atetralogy of novels that continued withStill Life (1985),Babel Tower (1996) andA Whistling Woman (2002).
Byatt's novelPossession: A Romance received the 1990Booker Prize, while her short story collectionThe Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye (1994) received the 1995Aga Khan Prize for Fiction. Her novelThe Children's Book was shortlisted for the 2009 Booker Prize and won the 2010James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Her critical work includes two studies ofDame Iris Murdoch (who was a friend and mentor),Degrees of Freedom: The Early Novels of Iris Murdoch (1965) andIris Murdoch: A Critical Study (1976). Her other critical studies includeWordsworth and Coleridge in Their Time (1970) andPortraits in Fiction (2001).
Byatt was awarded theShakespeare Prize in 2002, theErasmus Prize in 2016, thePark Kyong-ni Prize in 2017 and theHans Christian Andersen Literature Award in 2018. She was mentioned as a candidate for theNobel Prize in Literature.[5]
Antonia Susan Drabble was born inSheffield, England, on 24 August 1936,[6] as the eldest child ofJohn Frederick Drabble,QC, later a County Court judge, and Kathleen Bloor, a scholar ofBrowning.[7] Her sisters are the novelistMargaret Drabble and the art historian Helen Langdon. Her brother Richard DrabbleKC is abarrister.[8] The Drabble father participated inthe placement of Jewish refugees in Sheffield during the 1930s.[9] Her mother was aShavian and her father was aQuaker.[9] As a result of the bombing of Sheffield during theSecond World War the family moved toYork.[4]
Byatt was educated at two independent boarding schools,Sheffield High School andThe Mount School, a Quaker boarding school at York.[7]
An unhappy child, Byatt did not enjoy boarding school, citing her need to be alone and her difficulty in making friends.[7] Severe asthma often kept her in bed where reading became an escape from a difficult household.[10] She attendedNewnham College, Cambridge,Bryn Mawr College (in the United States), andSomerville College, Oxford.[6][11] Having studied French, German, Latin and English at school, she later studied Italian while attending Cambridge so that she could readDante.[2]
Byatt lectured in theDepartment of Extra-Mural Studies of theUniversity of London (1962–71),[6] theCentral School of Art and Design and from 1972 to 1983 atUniversity College London.[6] She began writing full-time in 1983.[12]
Byatt marriedIan Charles Rayner Byatt in 1959 and moved toDurham.[2] They had a daughter together,[13] as well as a son, Charles, who was killed by adrunk-driver at the age of 11 while walking home from school.[2][7][4] She spoke of her son's death and its influence on her lecturing and subsequent career after publishingThe Children's Book, in which the image of a dead child features.[2][7] She came to regard her academic career symbolically.[2] She later wrote the poem "Dead Boys".[7] The marriage was dissolved in 1969. Later that year, Byatt married Peter Duffy, and they had two daughters.[14][7][13]
Byatt's relationship with her sisterMargaret Drabble was sometimes strained due to the presence of autobiographical elements in both their writing. While their relationship was no longer especially close and they did not read each other's books, Drabble described the situation as "normal sibling rivalry"[15] and Byatt said it had been "terribly overstated by gossip columnists."[16] Byatt was an agnostic, though she maintained an affinity for Quaker services.[4][14] She enjoyed watchingsnooker, tennis, andfootball.[14][17]
Byatt lived primarily inPutney, and died at home on 16 November 2023, at the age of 87.[14][18][19]
Byatt was influenced byHenry James[2] andGeorge Eliot[7][4] as well asEmily Dickinson,[4]T. S. Eliot,Samuel Taylor Coleridge,[4]Tennyson[7] andRobert Browning,[7] in mergingrealism andnaturalism with fantasy. She was not an admirer of theBrontë family,[2] nor did she likeChristina Rossetti.[4] She was ambivalent aboutD. H. Lawrence.[2] She knewJane Austen's work "off by heart" before her teens.[4] In her books, Byatt alluded to, and built upon, themes fromRomantic andVictorian literature.[6] She cited art historianJohn Gage's book on the theory of colour as one of her favourite books to reread.[2]
Byatt wrote a lot while attending boarding school but had most of it burnt before she left.[2]
She began writing her first novel while at theUniversity of Cambridge, where she did not attend many lectures but when she did, she passed the time attempting to write a novel, which—given her limited experience of life—involved a young woman at university trying to write a novel, a novel, her novel, which—she knew—was "no good".[2] She left it in a drawer when she was finished.[2] After departing Cambridge, she spent one year as a postgraduate student in the United States and began her second novel,The Game, continuing to write it at Oxford when she returned to England.[2] After getting married in 1959 and moving toDurham, she leftThe Game aside and resumed work on her earlier novel.[2] She sent it to literary criticJohn Beer, whom she had befriended while at Cambridge.[2] Beer sent Byatt's novel to the independent book publishing companyChatto & Windus.[2] From thereCecil Day-Lewis wrote her a response and invited her to lunch atThe Athenaeum.[2] Day-Lewis was Byatt's first editor;D. J. Enright would succeed him.[4]
Shadow of a Sun, Byatt's first novel, is about a girl and her father and was published in 1964.[6] It was reprinted in 1991 with its originally intended title,The Shadow of the Sun, intact.[2]The Game, published in 1967, concerned the dynamics between two sisters.[6] The reception for Byatt's first books became confused withher sister's writing; her sister had a quicker rate of publication.[2]
The family theme is continued inThe Quartet,[4] Byatt'stetralogy of novels, which begins withThe Virgin in the Garden (1978) and continues withStill Life (1985),Babel Tower (1996) andA Whistling Woman (2002).[6] Her quartet is inspired byD. H. Lawrence, particularlyThe Rainbow andWomen in Love. The family portrayed in the quartet are fromYorkshire.[6] Byatt said the idea forThe Virgin in the Garden came in part from anextramural class she taught in which she had readTolstoy andDostoevsky and in part from her time living in Durham in 1961, the year in which her son was born.[2] The book was an attempt to understand what could be achieved ifMiddlemarch were written in the middle of the twentieth century.[2] Byatt's book features a powerful death scene, which she invented in 1961 (inspired by Byatt's reading ofAngus Wilson's bookThe Middle Age of Mrs Eliot and the accident in its opening), a death scene that has drawn complaints from numerous readers for its vividness.[2] Describing mid-20th-century Britain, the books follow the life of Frederica Potter, a young intellectual studying at Cambridge at a time when women were heavily outnumbered by men at that university, and then tracing her journey as adivorcée with a young son as he makes a new life in London. Byatt says some of the characters in her fiction represent her "greatest terror which is simple domesticity."[7] LikeBabel Tower,A Whistling Woman touches on theutopian and revolutionary dreams of the 1960s.[7]
Also an accomplished short story writer, Byatt's first published collection wasSugar and Other Stories (1987).[6]The Matisse Stories (1993) features three pieces, each describing a painting bythe eponymous painter; each is the tale of an initially smaller crisis that shows the long-present unravelling in the protagonists' lives.[6]The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye, published in 1994, is a collection offairy tales.[6] Byatt's other short story collections areElementals: Stories of Fire and Ice, published in 1998, andLittle Black Book of Stories, published in 2003.[6] Her books reflect a continuous interest inzoology,entomology, geology,[20] andDarwinism[2] among other repeated themes. She is also interested inlinguistics and takes a keen interest in the translation of her books.[2] Byatt said: "I can't say how important it was to me whenAngela Carter said 'I grew up on fairy stories—they're much more important to me than realist narratives'. I hadn't had the nerve to think that until she said it, and I owe her a great deal".[7] Carter, in an earlier (first) meeting with Byatt after aStevie Smith poetry reading, had dismissed Byatt's work, so this change of heart vindicated Byatt's approach to writing and Byatt readily acknowledged it.[2]
| External audio | |
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 Listen to an interview with A. S. Byatt given toFresh Air onWHYY-FM, 21 November 1991 (following publication ofPossession;c. 15 minutes)[21] |
Possession (1990) parallels the emerging relationship of two contemporary academics with the lives of two (fictional) 19th-century poets whom they are researching.[6] Possession is a historical fiction. It won the 1990Booker Prize and wasadapted for a film released in 2002.[22]
Byatt's novellaMorpho Eugenia was included inAngels & Insects (1992), which was turned intothe eponymous 1995 film; that film received anAcademy Award for Best Costume Designin 1997.[6][23]
Byatt's novelThe Biographer's Tale, published in 2000, she originally intended as a short story titled "The Biography of a Biographer", based on her notion of a biographer's life in a library investigating another person's life.[2] This she developed into writing about a character called Phineas G. Nanson, who is attempting to learn about a biographer for a book he intends to write, but who can only locate fragments of his three unwritten biographies, which are onGalton,Ibsen andLinnaeus.[2] Phineas Gilbert Nanson is named after an insect and is almost ananagram of Galton, Ibsen and Linnaeus, though Byatt said this was an uncanny coincidence that she did not realise until afterwards.[2]
The Children's Book, published in 2009, is a novel spanning from 1895 until the end of theFirst World War, centring on the fictional writer Olive Wellwood.[12] She is based uponE. Nesbit.[13] Another character—Herbert Methley—is a combination ofH. G. Wells andD. H. Lawrence, according to Byatt.[13] The novel also featuresRupert Brooke,Emma Goldman,Auguste Rodin,George Bernard Shaw,Virginia Woolf andOscar Wilde, all appearing as themselves.[13] Byatt initially intended to title the bookThe Hedgehog, the White Goose and the Mad March Hare.[13]
She wrote at her home inPutney, West London, and at another house in theCévennes inSouthern France, where she spent her summers.[14][2][4] She did not write her fiction on a computer, she did so by hand, though she had deployed a computer for non-fiction articles.[2] According to a 1991 unpublished interview with theLos Angeles Times Book Review, Byatt said she began her writing day at around 10 a.m., prompting herself by reading something easy and then something harder: "And then after a bit if I read something difficult that's really interesting I get this itch to start writing. So what I like to do is to write from about half past twelve, one, through to about four". At this point, she said, she would begin reading again.[24]
Byatt wrote two critical studies ofDame Iris Murdoch, who was a friend, mentor and another significant influence on her own writing.[4] They were titledDegrees of Freedom: The Early Novels of Iris Murdoch (1965) andIris Murdoch: A Critical Study (1976).[6] Byatt also described Murdoch's husbandJohn Bayley's decision to publish a memoir of his time with her as "wicked" and "unforgivable", saying: "I knew her enough to know that she would have hated it... it's had a horrible effect on how people feel about her and see her and think about her."[7]
Byatt's other critical studies includeWordsworth and Coleridge in Their Time (1970).[6] 2001'sPortraits in Fiction is about painting in novels, and features references toEmile Zola,Marcel Proust and Iris Murdoch; Byatt had earlier touched upon this subject in a 2000 lecture she delivered at theNational Portrait Gallery in London.[6]
Byatt had been a public encourager of the new young generation of British writers, includingPhilip Hensher (Kitchen Venom),[7][4]Robert Irwin (Exquisite Corpse),[4]A. L. Kennedy,[4]Lawrence Norfolk,[7][4]David Mitchell (Ghostwritten),[7][4]Ali Smith (Hotel World),[7][4]Zadie Smith (White Teeth)[4] andAdam Thirlwell,[7] saying in 2009 that she was "not entirely disinterested, because I wish there to be a literary world in which people are not writing books only about people's feelings ... all the ones I like write also about ideas".[7] She contrasted some of those preferences with the work ofMartin Amis,Julian Barnes,Ian McEwan andGraham Swift—then added, "In fact I admire all four of those writers... they don't only do people's feelings... nevertheless it's becomeossified".[7] Norfolk she described in 2003 as "the best of the young novelists now writing".[4] She also spoke of her admiration for American writerHelen DeWitt's bookThe Last Samurai.[4] Hensher, who counts Byatt as a friend, said: "She's very unusual for an English person, in that she's quite suspicious of comedy. With most people, sooner or later, every intellectual position comes down to a joke—it never does with her."[7]
Byatt was a judge on many literary award panels, including theBetty Trask Award, theDavid Higham Prize for Fiction,[25] theHawthornden Prize and the Booker.[6] She also wrote for the media, including forThe Times Literary Supplement, British journalProspect and newspapersThe Guardian,The Independent andThe Sunday Times.[6][26][27]
Byatt was mentioned as a candidate for theNobel Prize in Literature.[5]
Byatt was appointedCommander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the1990 New Year Honours,[28] and was promoted toDame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE), "for services to Literature", inElizabeth II's1999 Birthday Honours.[29][12]
She was also awarded:
The following books form atetralogy known asThe Quartet:The Virgin in the Garden (1978),Still Life (1985),Babel Tower (1996) andA Whistling Woman (2002).[6]
Audio interviews and readings
