A. S. Byatt (1936–2023)
Author of Possession
About the Author
A.S. Byatt was born on August 24, 1936 in Sheffield, England. She received a B.A. from Newnham College, Cambridge in 1957, did graduate study at Bryn Mawr College from 1957-58, and attended Somerville College, Oxford from 1958-59. She was a staff member in the extra-mural department at the show more University of London from 1962-71. From 1968-69, she was also a part-time lecturer in the liberal studies department of the Central School of Art and Design, London. She was a lecturer at University College from 1972-80 and then senior lecturer from 1981-83. She became a full-time writer in 1983. Her works include The Biographer's Tale, The Virgin in the Garden, Babel Tower, A Whistling Woman, and The Children's Book. She also wrote numerous collections of short stories including Sugar and Other Stories, The Matisse Stories, The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye, Elementals, and Little Black Book of Stories. Byatt received the English Speaking Union fellowship in 1957-58, the Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1983, the Silver Pen Award for Still Life, and the Booker Prize for Possession: A Romance in 1990. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Image credit: Ulf Andersen / Gamma-Rapho
Series
Works by A. S. Byatt
The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye / The Story of the Eldest Princess / Dragons' Breath (1995) — Author — 15 copies, 2 reviews
Possession | Angels & Insects — Author — 2 copies
Cold {story} 2 copies
The Biographer's Tale 1 copy
Sugar And Other Stories 1 copy
The Matisse Stories 1 copy
A Whistling Woman 1 copy
Envy {story} 1 copy
Sugar 1 copy
Îngeri și insecte 1 copy
2001 1 copy
George Eliot 1819 - 1880 1 copy
A Glass Coffin {short story} 1 copy
Introduction to "Beloved" 1 copy
By A. S. Byatt Possession 1 copy
Gode's Story {short story} 1 copy
Associated Works
The Rubáiyat of Omar Khayyám (FitzGerald) (1120) — Introduction, some editions — 6,077 copies, 87 reviews
The Arabian Nights: Tales from a Thousand and One Nights [Modern Library] (2001) — Introduction, some editions — 1,933 copies, 24 reviews
A Blink of the Screen: Collected Shorter Fiction (2012) — Foreword, some editions — 1,460 copies, 54 reviews
Enormous Changes at the Last Minute: Stories (1974) — Introduction, some editions — 771 copies, 10 reviews
The History of England: By a Partial, Prejudiced and Ignorant Historian (1791) — Introduction, some editions — 729 copies, 14 reviews
The Quest for Corvo : An Experiment in Biography (1934) — Introduction, some editions — 656 copies, 13 reviews
A Truth Universally Acknowledged: 33 Great Writers on Why We Read Jane Austen (2009) — Contributor — 413 copies, 18 reviews
Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Women Writers Explore Their Favorite Fairy Tales (1998) — Contributor, some editions — 312 copies, 4 reviews
The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Ninth Annual Collection (1996) — Contributor — 258 copies, 3 reviews
The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Sixth Annual Collection (1993) — Contributor — 219 copies, 1 review
The Outspoken Princess and the Gentle Knight: A Treasury of Modern Fairy Tales (1994) — Contributor — 208 copies, 3 reviews
George Eliot: Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings (1991) — Editor, some editions; Introduction, some editions — 168 copies, 1 review
The Pleasure of Reading: 43 Writers on the Discovery of Reading and the Books That Inspired Them (2015) — Contributor — 104 copies, 2 reviews
The Grimm Reader: The Classic Tales of the Brothers Grimm (2010) — Introduction — 70 copies, 1 review
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Byatt, A. S.
- Legal name
- Duffy, Antonia Susan
- Other names
- Byatt, Antonia Susan
Drabble, Antonia Susan (birth) - Birthdate
- 1936-08-24
- Date of death
- 2023-11-16
- Gender
- female
- Education
- University of Cambridge (BA|1957|Newnham College)
Bryn Mawr College
University of Oxford (Somerville College) - Occupations
- short story writer
novelist
academic
teacher - Organizations
- University of London (University College)
Central School of Art and Design - Awards and honors
- Order of the British Empire (Commander, 1990)
Order of the British Empire (Dame Commander, 1999)
Premio Malaparte (1995)
Shakespeare Prize (2002)
Park Kyong-ni Prize (2017)
American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2014) (show all 13)
Aga Khan Prize for Fiction (1995)
PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award (1986)
Commonwealth Writers Prize (1991)
Erasmus Prize (2016)
British Academy (Fellow, 2017)
Golden Plate Award from American Academy of Achievement (2017)
Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award (2018) - Relationships
- Duffy, Peter (husband)
Byatt, Ian Charles Rayner (first husband)
Drabble, Margaret (sister)
Langdon, Helen (sister)
Holroyd, Michael (brother-in-law)
Swift, Rebecca (1) (niece) (show all 7)
Swift, Joe (nephew) - Short biography
- Antonia Susan Drabble was born in Yorkshire and educated at a Quaker school in York. After studying at Cambridge University and Bryn Mawr College, she did postgraduate work at Oxford University. In 1959, she married Ian Charles Rayner Byatt and had two children; she later married Peter John Duffy and had two more children. She goes by the pen name A.S. Byatt. She taught in the Extra-Mural Department of London University and the Central School of Art and Design, and in 1972 became full-time Lecturer in English and American Literature at University College, London. She left in 1983 to concentrate on her writing full-time. She has travelled widely to lecture and talk about her work, often with the British Council, and was Chairman of the Society of Authors between 1986 and 1988. She has served on the judging panels for a number of literary prizes, including the Booker Prize for Fiction, and is recognised as a distinguished critic, contributing regularly to journals and newspapers including the Times Literary Supplement, The Independent and the Sunday Times, as well as to BBC radio and television programs. Her first novel, Shadow of a Sun, was published in 1964. A.S. Byatt was awarded a CBE in 1990 and a DBE in 1999.
- Nationality
- UK
- Birthplace
- Sheffield, South Yorkshire, England, UK
- Places of residence
- Sheffield, South Yorkshire, England, UK
- Place of death
- London, Middlesex, England, UK
- Map Location
- England, UK
Members
Discussions
BRITISH AUTHOR CHALLENGE - SHEFFIELD in 75 Books Challenge for 2017 (June 2017)
Heritage Club and Hollywood in George Macy devotees (May 2017)
***Group Read of The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt in 2015 Category Challenge (April 2015)
JULY: Reading A. S. Byatt in Monthly Author Reads (September 2011)
Reviews
This pushed buttons I wasn’t even sure a book could push. Academia, critique and celebration of? Check. History and how we approach it? Check. Victorian literature, impeccably recreated? Check. Passion for books and language? Check. Feminism and sexuality? Check. Folklore and mythology? Check. Gorgeous writing and excellent plotting? Double check. I can’t even begin to imagine how Byatt managed to get so much into this, so tightly, so layered. She even manages to get lines of poetry to show more further the plot, my gods.
You’ll notice I’m not going much into the plot here. That’s because this is one of those books that’s so complex that any attempt at the plot winds up reductive. Basically, I loved it and you should all read it.
10/10 show less
You’ll notice I’m not going much into the plot here. That’s because this is one of those books that’s so complex that any attempt at the plot winds up reductive. Basically, I loved it and you should all read it.
10/10 show less
Frustratingly, this 1991 reissue of Byatt's first novel (originally published as Shadow of a sun in 1964) comes with a critical introduction by the author that already says just about everything intelligent that needs to be said about it — it's hard to know what to add!
Byatt started writing the book when she was a Cambridge undergraduate in the late fifties, and completed it as a young mother in Durham a few years later. In its subject-matter, it looks like a typical first novel: a young show more woman setting out on life and being pushed into a choice between what at that time seemed like mutually-exclusive possibilities: to run away ("to Mexico") and develop as a creative artist; fearlessly to investigate the creativity of others as a critic; or to find sex and security at the kitchen sink. They are embodied by the huge figure of her egotistical great-novelist father, Henry; by the Leavisite critic Oliver; and by various interchangeable Oxbridge young men.
This is England in the fifties, so class comes into it as well, of course: Anna has grown up in a very sheltered Elizabeth Taylor/Dorothy Whipple middle-class, rural, Home Counties, ponies-and-boarding-school world, whilst the puritanical Oliver has clawed his way up from a deprived working-class background, and the Oxbridge young men are an (almost) imperceptible notch grander than Anna's family.
However, it doesn't really feel like a first novel: there are bold and original flights of fancy in the descriptions (Blake and Samuel Palmer always seem to be lurking in the background, as well as the inevitable D H Lawrence) and there is a donnish self-confidence in the witty put-downs (of the ruthlessly-corseted Lady Hughes-Winterton: "God had designed her to be a cottage loaf and she had thwarted him"). Byatt brings such big guns into play in her imagery that there's occasionally a feeling of overkill, that all this literary apparatus isn't appropriate to such charming domestic circumstances, but of course that's part of the point she's making. The charm and security of middle-class domesticity is all part of the self-deception.
I wonder whether it would have been obvious to someone reading this in 1964 that it was primarily a feminist novel? With hindsight, and especially in the light of Byatt's own analysis, it's clear that it's about the way society conspires to limit the choices available to women, even when they are clever and come from privileged backgrounds. But at the time, it might have looked more like a book about adolescent choices that happened to be written from a woman's perspective.
Well worth coming back to, anyway. show less
Byatt started writing the book when she was a Cambridge undergraduate in the late fifties, and completed it as a young mother in Durham a few years later. In its subject-matter, it looks like a typical first novel: a young show more woman setting out on life and being pushed into a choice between what at that time seemed like mutually-exclusive possibilities: to run away ("to Mexico") and develop as a creative artist; fearlessly to investigate the creativity of others as a critic; or to find sex and security at the kitchen sink. They are embodied by the huge figure of her egotistical great-novelist father, Henry; by the Leavisite critic Oliver; and by various interchangeable Oxbridge young men.
This is England in the fifties, so class comes into it as well, of course: Anna has grown up in a very sheltered Elizabeth Taylor/Dorothy Whipple middle-class, rural, Home Counties, ponies-and-boarding-school world, whilst the puritanical Oliver has clawed his way up from a deprived working-class background, and the Oxbridge young men are an (almost) imperceptible notch grander than Anna's family.
However, it doesn't really feel like a first novel: there are bold and original flights of fancy in the descriptions (Blake and Samuel Palmer always seem to be lurking in the background, as well as the inevitable D H Lawrence) and there is a donnish self-confidence in the witty put-downs (of the ruthlessly-corseted Lady Hughes-Winterton: "God had designed her to be a cottage loaf and she had thwarted him"). Byatt brings such big guns into play in her imagery that there's occasionally a feeling of overkill, that all this literary apparatus isn't appropriate to such charming domestic circumstances, but of course that's part of the point she's making. The charm and security of middle-class domesticity is all part of the self-deception.
I wonder whether it would have been obvious to someone reading this in 1964 that it was primarily a feminist novel? With hindsight, and especially in the light of Byatt's own analysis, it's clear that it's about the way society conspires to limit the choices available to women, even when they are clever and come from privileged backgrounds. But at the time, it might have looked more like a book about adolescent choices that happened to be written from a woman's perspective.
Well worth coming back to, anyway. show less
Byatt, through the eyes of a christianity-raised child encountering Norse myths for the first time, writes a wonderfully evocative tale of enchantment and fascination with a grim and imaginative mythological cycle that she finds more exciting than stories about a milksop Jesus.
With a superb sense of poetic diction Byatt paints the inside of your skull with vicarious allure. Recommended.
With a superb sense of poetic diction Byatt paints the inside of your skull with vicarious allure. Recommended.
There are readings—of the same text—that are dutiful, readings that map and dissect, readings that hear a rustling of unheard sounds, that count grey little pronouns for pleasure or instruction and for a time do not hear golden or apples. There are personal readings, which snatch for personal meanings, I am full of love, or disgust, or fear, I scan for love, or disgust, or fear. There are—believe it—impersonal readings—where the mind's eye sees the lines move onwards and the mind'sshow more
ear hears them sing and sing.
Now and then there are readings that make the hairs on the neck, the non-existent pelt, stand on end and tremble, when every word burns and shines hard and clear and infinite and exact, like stones of fire, like points of stars in the dark—readings when the knowledge that we shall know the writing differently or better or satisfactorily, runs ahead of any capacity to say what we know, or how. In these readings, a sense that the text has appeared to be wholly new, never before seen, is followed, almost immediately, by the sense that it was always there, that we the readers, knew it was always there, and have always known it was as it was, though we have now for the first time recognised, become fully cognizant of, our knowledge.
47. Possession by A. S. Byatt
OPD: 1990
format: 555-page paperback
acquired: April read: Jun 30 – Jul 31 time reading: 26:46, 2.9 mpp
rating: 5
genre/style: Fiction theme: Booker legacy
locations: London, Yorkshire and French Britany in 1986 and in the 19th-century
about the author: 1936 –2023: an English critic, novelist, poet and short story writer born in Sheffield. Her sisters are the novelist Margaret Drabble and the art historian Helen Langdon.
It's little hard for me to adequately explain how much I enjoyed this book, was obsessed by it (possessed), and was so unrelentingly curious. I was aware of this while reading, from about page 7 when it fully struck that I wanted to be involved. And that feeling never spoiled. I adored this book. I want to tell you it's the best book written in my lifetime, and why. But I can't adequately express that. Nor do I know if that kind of evaluation makes sense. But, what's weird is that this was all fiction. It's just a book. My obsession was for information, fictional information about fictional characters. When characters discuss illegally digging up a buried body to find lost letters, my brain said, "dig! Justify it later. Just dig! I want those letters!" Although I can't say my brain used any words exactly.
Byatt's first really successful novel, a hugely successful one, was planned this way. She wanted to write about academic stuff, ideas she was interested in. And she thought that if she could hook readers on a mystery, then she could write anything she liked, and we would read it. So, she opens with 19th-century poetry (which she wrote herself, in time-period mimicry, stylistic flaws included), then has us sit with a meek research assistant to a professor studying this 19th-century author, when he, the meek assistant, makes a little discovery of unclear meaning. He finds a draft of a letter hinting at...something. And he steals the relic form the research library! I was hooked.
Then Byatt piles stuff on. More mystery, more discovery, romance, ancient and contemporary, and she can do romance gorgeously; but this romance is all newly found, layering the sense of discovery. oh. Mythology, standing stones. And poetry. Poetry everywhere. We learn about our researchers and their academic squabbles, and about their 19th-century subjects and 19th-century secret affairs. All this mad stuff works. I was fully possessed.
It's so strange to close this book and separate yourself from that that feeling. It's all fiction. It's just a book. But it's a magnificent book. I was obsessed, and it lasted and stayed with me a long time. I loved how reasonable the whole thing was. Just researchers acting crazy, and 19th-century poets acting like 19th-century poets. Ultimately, despite seance's and the quest for ghosts, there is nothing supernatural here. Except what occurs to the reader.
Byatt was very aware of what she was doing and how well it worked. She has talked about it. She also wrote about it here, giving us a beautiful section on the experience of reading, on what it does to the mind, on all the different ways we read (partially quoted above). And then immediately follows that with a pseudo-19th-century poem on hunger, which we all must process, at least in some mindset, as hunger for information. "we must have more... We are driven/By endings as by hunger. We must know/How it comes out...". This is curiosity, an obsessive form of it. These sections together near the end are not an accident. It's a compression of everything the book has just done to the reader, into a few pages. It's the author creating magic out of nothing, and aware of it, and taking time to tell her reader about it. That's just beautiful.
Recommended to anyone who likes post-1950's literature.
2024
https://www.librarything.com/topic/362165#8596175 show less
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Awards
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Statistics
- Works
- 83
- Also by
- 74
- Members
- 38,289
- Popularity
- #470
- Rating
- 4.0
- Reviews
- 880
- ISBNs
- 575
- Languages
- 22
- Favorited
- 233
