Antonia Susan Byatt
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For more information on Antonia Susan Byatt, visit Britannica.com.
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
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
— Stephen Benson
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."
| Born: | August 24 1936 Sheffield, England |
|---|---|
| Occupation: | Writer, Poet |
| Nationality: | British |
| Writing period: | 1964 - present |
| Debut works: | The Shadow of the Sun |
| Website: | http://www.asbyatt.com |
Dame Antonia Susan Byatt, Lady 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 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
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
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
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."
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.
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