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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.

For more information on Antonia Susan Byatt, visit Britannica.com.

 
 
Fairy Tale Companion: A. S. Byatt

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

 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Byatt, A. S.
(Antonia Susan Byatt) (bī'ət), 1936–, British novelist; sister of Margaret Drabble. Educated at Cambridge, Bryn Mawr College, Pa., and Oxford, she is a noted critic and novelist whose work is erudite, subtle, and passionate. Her best-known novel, Possession (1989)—at once a mystery, a work of Victorian literary scholarship, a romance, and a philosophical inquiry into the nature of love—won the Booker Prize. Byatt's other fiction includes a quartet of novels, The Virgin in the Garden (1978), Still-Life (1985), Babel Tower (1996), and A Whistling Woman (2002), centered around a Yorkshire family and exploring modern English life, as well as the novella Angels and Insects (1992) and the novel The Biographer's Tale (2001), both of which examine Victorian times with a contemporary sensibility. She is also known for studies of Iris Murdoch (1965, 1976) and other literary essays, e.g., Passions of the Mind (1992) and On Histories and Stories (2000); short stories, e.g., Matisse Stories (1993), Elementals (1999), and Little Black Book of Stories (2004); and fairy tales (1997).
 
Quotes By: Antonia S. Byatt

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
A. S. Byatt
Born: August 24 1936 (1936--) (age 71)
Sheffield, England
Occupation: Writer, Poet
Nationality: British
Writing period: 1964 - present
Debut works: The Shadow of the Sun
Website: http://www.asbyatt.com
For A. Byatt, the director of French documentary films, see Andy Byatt.

Dame Antonia Susan Byatt, Lady Byatt, DBE (born Antonia Susan Drabble August 24, 1936, Sheffield, England) is a postmodern novelist. She is usually known as A. S. Byatt.

Life and career

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 marriage to Ian Byatt (now Sir Ian Byatt). She lectured at London University extra-murally, the Central School of Art and Design and from 1972 to 1981 at University College London. Since becoming a full-time writer, Byatt has published several novels, most notably Possession, which won the prestigious Booker Prize in 1990. Two of her works have been adapted into motion pictures: Possession and Angels & Insects.

Also well-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 The Rainbow and Women in Love. There and in other works, Byatt alludes to, and builds upon, themes from Romantic and Victorian literature. Byatt conceives of fantasy as an alternative to--rather than an escape from--everyday life, and often it is difficult to tell if what is fantastic in her work is actually the irruption of psychosis. More recent books by Byatt have brought to fore her interest in science, particularly cognitive science and zoology.

A. S. 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. 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 the quintessential bluestocking -- a woman undergraduate at Cambridge at a time when women were heavily outnumbered by men at that University, and later, 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) featured 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.

Byatt's younger sister, Margaret Drabble, is also a successful novelist, and the rivalry between the two is legendary, although of uncertain origin. It has been suggested by some that, before becoming successful in her own right, Byatt resented her sister because Drabble gained a starred double-first over her own mere double-first. Drabble herself suggests that part of the rift is due, after the death of Byatt's son in a car accident, to the guilt she felt that her own children survived (this reported by Suzie Mackenzie of the UK's Guardian Unlimited.) Byatt has stated publicly that Drabble's depiction of their mother in Drabble's book The Peppered Moth angered her.

She has also written several times for British intellectual journal Prospect magazine. She was awarded a CBE in 1990, then a DBE in 1999.

The Harry Potter controversy

More recently, A. S. Byatt caused controversy by suggesting that the popularity of J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series of books is because they are "written for people whose imaginative lives are confined to TV cartoons, and the exaggerated (more exciting, not threatening) mirror-worlds of soaps, reality TV and celebrity gossip." In her editorial column in the New York Times newspaper, she scathingly attacked adult readers of the series as uncultured, claiming that "they don't have the skills to tell ersatz magic from the real thing, for as children they daily invested the ersatz with what imagination they had."

After the column appeared in the newspaper, her editorial was described by Salon.com contributing writer Charles Taylor as "upfront in its snobbishness." He also suggested that Byatt's claims may be due to jealousy towards Rowling's commercial success.

In an article in the Guardian, the author Fay Weldon defended Byatt in this controversy over Harry Potter, and praised her courage for speaking out. "She is absolutely right that it is not what the poets hoped for, but this is not poetry, it is readable, saleable, everyday, useful prose," Weldon said. She said she found the sight of adults reading the Potter series troubling, adding: "Byatt does have a point in everything she says but at the same time she sounds like a bit of a spoilsport. She is being a party pooper but then the party pooper is often right."

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
  • Longman, 1976
  • The Virgin in the Garden Chatto & Windus, 1978
  • Still Life Chatto & Windus, 1985
  • Sugar and Other Stories Chatto & Windus, 1987
  • Hogarth Press, 1989
  • (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
  • 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

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.

External links

Man Booker Prize Winners for Fiction
1960-1969

P. H. Newby (1969)
1970-1979

Bernice Rubens (1970) • V. S. Naipaul (1971) • John Berger (1972) • James Gordon Farrell (1973) • Nadine Gordimer / Stanley Middleton (1974) • Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (1975) • David Storey (1976) • Paul Scott (1977) • Iris Murdoch (1978) • Penelope Fitzgerald (1979)
1980-1989

William Golding (1980) • Salman Rushdie (1981) • Thomas Keneally (1982) • John Maxwell Coetzee (1983) • Anita Brookner (1984) • Keri Hulme (1985) • Kingsley Amis (1986) • Penelope Lively (1987) • Peter Carey (1988) • Kazuo Ishiguro (1989)
1990-1999

A. S. Byatt (1990) • Ben Okri (1991) • Michael Ondaatje / Barry Unsworth (1992) • Roddy Doyle (1993) • James Kelman (1994) • Pat Barker (1995) • Graham Swift (1996) • Arundhati Roy (1997) • Ian McEwan (1998) • John Maxwell Coetzee (1999)
2000-2010

Margaret Atwood (2000) • Peter Carey (2001) • Yann Martel (2002) • DBC Pierre (2003) • Alan Hollinghurst (2004) • John Banville (2005) • Kiran Desai (2006) • Anne Enright (2007)

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Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
Fairy Tale Companion. The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales. Copyright © 2000, 2002, 2005 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.  Read more
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Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "A. S. Byatt".  Read more

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