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A. S. Byatt

 
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Antonia Susan Byatt

(born Aug. 24, 1936, Sheffield, Eng.) British novelist and scholar. Sister of Margaret Drabble, she was educated at Cambridge and taught at University College, London. Her third novel, The Virgin in the Garden (1978), won high acclaim; the sequel Still Life (1985) followed. Possession (1990), a virtuoso double narrative, won the 1990 Booker Prize, and both it and Angels and Insects (1991) were adapted for film. Her story collections include The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye (1995) and Elementals (1998). Degrees of Freedom (1965) was the first major study of Iris Murdoch. In 2002 Byatt published the novel A Whistling Woman, the last of a series of four novels — beginning with The Virgin in the Garden — featuring the character Frederica Potter.

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Fairy Tale Companion: A. S. Byatt
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Byatt, A. S. (Antonia Susan, 1936– ), English novelist and critic. Before leaving academia in 1983 to concentrate full‐time on writing, she had published book‐length studies of Iris Murdoch—a significant influence on her work—and Wordsworth and Coleridge. Byatt's fiction combines a detailed evocation of time and place, including cultural and intellectual milieu, with an almost 19th‐century concern for character and morality. It can also be densely allusive, exploring the interaction between art and life, and it is as part of this exploration that the fairy tale has come to figure in her work.

The Booker Prize‐winning Possession: A Romance (1990), an erudite and complex novel interweaving Victorian lives with late 20th‐century biographical and academic investigations into the written evidence of these lives, contains several interpolated fairy tales. Along with an epic poem concerning the Fairy Melusina, these include ‘The Glass Coffin’ (a variation on ‘Sleeping Beauty’), and a bleak and elliptical oral narrative told by a Breton servant. Both of these tales were subsequently reprinted as the first two items in a collection of five fairy stories by Byatt, The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye (1995). Her awareness of generic conventions, together with her adoption of a characteristically enriched fairy‐tale idiom, is evident in ‘The Story of the Eldest Princess’, which tells of a young heroine whose perspicacity enables her to succeed against the grain of fairy‐tale expectation. The title story of the collection is a novella set in 1991, involving the punningly named Gillian Perholt, a 55‐year‐old narratologist who comes face‐to‐face with a Djinn while attending a conference in Ankara devoted to ‘Stories of Women's Lives’. Drawing heavily on The Arabian Nights, Byatt spins a narrative web around the themes of plotting, powerlessness, and fate in the folk tale, and the meeting of cultures via storytelling. Its length and interweaving of motifs suggests parallels with the extended salon fairy tales of Mme Aulnoy d' and Mme Leprince de Beaumont; indeed, Byatt herself translated Mme d'Aulnoy's ‘Le Serpentin vert’ (‘The Great Green Worm’) for Marina Warner's collection of Wonder Tales (1994).

Employing the same technique as Possession—allowing narrator and tale to resonate within the context of the work as a whole—Byatt's novella ‘Morpho Eugenia’ (1992) includes the embedded fairy tale ‘Things Are Not What They Seem’. Based around the themes of language and scientific classification, Byatt again explores the place of the fairy tale in the intellectual climate of the second half of the 19th century.

Bibliography

  • Ashworth, Ann, ‘Fairy Tales in A. S. Byatt's Possession, Journal of Evolutionary Psychology, 15 (1994).
  • Sanchez, Victoria, ‘A. S. Byatt's Possession: A Fairytale Romance’, Southern Folklore, 52 (1995).
  • Todd, Richard, A. S. Byatt (1997).

— Stephen Benson

Quotes By: Antonia S. Byatt
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Quotes:

"Pain hardens, and great pain hardens greatly, whatever the comforters say, and suffering does not ennoble, though it may occasionally lend a certain rigid dignity of manner to the suffering frame."

Wikipedia: A. S. Byatt
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A. S. Byatt

June, 2007 - Lyon, France.
Born Antonia Susan Drabble
24 August 1936 (1936-08-24) (age 73)
Sheffield, England
Occupation Writer, Poet
Nationality British
Writing period 1964–present
Official website

Dame Antonia Susan Duffy, DBE (Born Antonia Susan Drabble 24 August 1936, Sheffield, England) is an English novelist and poet. She is the daughter of His Honour John Frederick Drabble, QC and late Kathleen Marie Bloor, and married to Peter Duffy. She is usually known as A. S. Byatt.

Contents

Life and career

Byatt was educated at The Mount School, York, Newnham College Cambridge, Bryn Mawr in Pennsylvania, USA and Somerville College, Oxford, though her research grant to the latter institution (dependent on single status) ended with her first marriage to Ian Byatt (later Sir Ian Byatt) in 1959. Her younger sister is the novelist Margaret Drabble and their younger sister is the art historian Helen Langdon.

She lectured in the Department of Extra-Mural Studies of London University (1962-71),[1] the Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design and from 1972 to 1983 at University College London.[1]

Byatt's first novel, The Shadow of the Sun, the story of a young girl growing up in the shadow of a dominant father, was published in 1964 and was followed by The Game (1967), a study of the relationship between two sisters.[1] The Virgin in the Garden (1978) is the first book in a quartet about the members of a Yorkshire family. The story continues in Still Life (1985), which won the PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award, and Babel Tower (1996). The fourth (and final) novel in the quartet is A Whistling Woman (2002). The quartet describes mid-20th-century Britain and Frederica's life as a young female intellectual studying at Cambridge, at a time when women were heavily outnumbered by men at that university, and later, as a divorcée with a young son making a new life in London. Like Babel Tower, A Whistling Woman covers the '60s and dips into the utopian and revolutionary dreams of the time. The Matisse Stories, (1993) features three stories, each describing a painting by Henri Matisse that inspired Byatt, each the tale of an initially smaller crisis that shows the long-present unravelling in the protagonists' lives.

Possession (1990) is her best known novel, which parallels the emerging relationship of two contemporary academics with the past of two (fictional) nineteenth century poets whom they are researching. It won the Booker Prize in 1990.

Also known for her short stories, Byatt has been influenced by Henry James and George Eliot as well as Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, and Robert Browning, in merging realism and naturalism with fantasy. In her quartet of novels about mid-century England, she is clearly indebted to D. H. Lawrence, particularly to The Rainbow and Women in Love. Iris Murdoch, about whose early works Byatt wrote a book of criticism, was also an influence. In those books and other works, Byatt alludes to, and builds upon, themes from Romantic and Victorian literature. She conceives of fantasy as an alternative to—rather than an escape from—everyday life, and it is often difficult to tell when the fantastic in her work actually represents the eruption of psychosis. More recent books by Byatt have brought to the fore her interest in science, particularly cognitive science and zoology.

Two of Byatt's works have been adapted into motion pictures: Possession (2002) and Angels & Insects (1995).

Byatt has written for the British intellectual journal Prospect and for The Guardian. She was awarded a CBE in 1990 and the DBE in 1999.

Personal life

Her second husband is Peter Duffy, whom she married in 1969. She has four children, one of whom was killed in a car accident at the age of 11 and about whom she wrote the poem 'Dead Boys' [2]. On the role of writing in her life, she says:

'I think of writing simply in terms of pleasure. It's the most important thing in my life, making things. Much as I love my husband and my children, I love them only because I am the person who makes these things. I, who I am, is the person that has the project of making a thing. Well, that's putting it pompously - but constructing. I do see it in sort of three-dimensional structures. And because that person does that all the time, that person is able to love all these people.' [2]

Member of

  • Social Effects of Television Advisory Group BBC, 1974-77;
  • Associate of Newnham College, Cambridge, 1977-82
  • Board of Communications and Cultural Studies, CNAA, 1978-84;
  • Board of Creative and Performing Arts, CNAA, 1985-87;
  • Kingman Committee of Inquiry into the teaching of English Language, (Department of Education and Science) 1987-88;
  • Management Committee, Society of Authors, 1984-88 (Deputy Chairman, 1986, Chairman, 1986-88);
  • Board, British Council, 1993-98 (Member of Literature Advisory Panel, 1990-98).
  • Judge of literary prizes including Hawthornden, Booker, David Higham, Betty Trask

Bibliography

  • The Shadow of the Sun Chatto & Windus, 1964
  • Degrees of Freedom: The Early Novels of Iris Murdoch Chatto & Windus, 1965
  • The Game Chatto & Windus, 1967
  • Wordsworth and Coleridge in Their Time Nelson, 1970
  • Iris Murdoch: A Critical Study Longman, 1976
  • The Virgin in the Garden Chatto & Windus, 1978
  • Still Life Chatto & Windus, 1985
  • Sugar and Other Stories Chatto & Windus, 1987
  • Unruly Times: Wordsworth and Coleridge, Poetry and Life Hogarth Press, 1989
  • George Eliot: Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings (editor with Nicholas Warren) Penguin, 1990
  • Possession: A Romance Chatto & Windus, (1990 ISBN 0 7011 3260 4)
  • Passions of the Mind: Selected Writings Chatto & Windus, 1991
  • Angels & Insects Chatto & Windus, 1992
  • The Matisse Stories Chatto & Windus, 1993
  • The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye Chatto & Windus, 1994
  • Imagining Characters: Six Conversations about Women Writers (with Ignes Sodre) Chatto & Windus, 1995
  • New Writing Volume 4 (editor with Alan Hollinghurst) Vintage, 1995
  • Babel Tower Chatto & Windus, 1996
  • New Writing Volume 6 (editor with Peter Porter) Vintage, 1997
  • Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice Chatto & Windus, 1998
  • Oxford Book of English Short Stories (editor) Oxford University Press, 1998
  • On Histories and Stories: Selected Essays Chatto & Windus, 2000
  • The Biographer's Tale Chatto & Windus, 2000
  • Portraits in Fiction Chatto & Windus, 2001
  • The Bird Hand Book (with photographs by Victor Schrager) Graphis (New York), 2001
  • A Whistling Woman Chatto & Windus, 2002
  • Little Black Book of Stories Chatto & Windus, 2003
  • The Children's Book Chatto & Windus, (2009 ISBN 9780701183899)

Prizes and awards

She has been granted the title of "Duchess of Morpho Eugenia" by the Spanish writer Javier Marías, claimant to the micronational title of King of Redonda.[citation needed]

References

External links


 
 

 

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