A. S. Byatt

Byatt wrote a lot whilst attending boarding school but had most of it burnt before she left.[3]

She began writing her first novel while at the University 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".[3] She left it in a drawer when she was finished.[3] 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.[3] After getting married in 1959 and moving to Durham, she left The Game aside and resumed work on her earlier novel.[3] She sent it to literary critic John Beer, whom she had befriended while at Cambridge and, she later said, "whose ideas, I think, run through almost everything I write".[3] Beer sent Byatt's novel to the independent book publishing company Chatto & Windus.[3] From there Cecil Day-Lewis wrote her a response and invited her to lunch at The Athenaeum, where he shared his thoughts on "poetry and Yeats and Auden and Shakespeare, and it was the literary conversation I had never had. When we got out on the pavement I rather tremblingly said, Might you be thinking of publishing this novel? He said, Oh yes, of course, of course".[3] Day-Lewis was Byatt's first editor; D. J. Enright would succeed him.[10]

Shadow of a Sun, Byatt's first novel, is about a girl and her father and was published in 1964.[1] It was reprinted in 1991 with its originally intended title, The Shadow of the Sun, intact.[3] The Game, published in 1967, concerned the dynamics between two sisters.[1] The reception for Byatt's first books became confused with her sister's writing; her sister had a quicker rate of publication.[3]

The family theme is continued in The Quartet,[17] Byatt's tetralogy of novels, which begins with The Virgin in the Garden (1978) and continues with Still Life (1985), Babel Tower (1996) and A Whistling Woman (2002).[1] Her quartet is inspired by D. H. Lawrence, particularly The Rainbow and Women in Love. The family portrayed in the quartet are from Yorkshire.[1] Byatt said the idea for The Virgin in the Garden came in part from an extramural class she taught in which she had read Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and in part from her time living in Durham in 1961, the year in which her son was born.[3] The book was an attempt to understand what could be achieved if Middlemarch were written in the middle of the twentieth century.[3] Byatt's book features a powerful death scene, which she invented in 1961 (inspired by Byatt's reading of Angus Wilson's book The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot and the accident in its opening), a death scene that has drawn complaints from numerous readers for its vividness.[3] 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 a divorcée 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... I had this image of coming out from under and seeing the light for a bit and then being shut in a kitchen, which I think happened to women of my generation."[7] Like Babel Tower, A Whistling Woman touches on the utopian and revolutionary dreams of the 1960s. Byatt described herself as "a naturally pessimistic animal": "I don't believe that human beings are basically good, so I think all utopian movements are doomed to fail, but I am interested in them."[7]

Also an accomplished short story writer, Byatt's first published collection was Sugar and Other Stories (1987).[1] The Matisse Stories (1993) features three pieces, each describing a painting by the eponymous painter; each is the tale of an initially smaller crisis that shows the long-present unravelling in the protagonists' lives.[1] The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye, published in 1994, is a collection of fairy tales.[1] Byatt's other short story collections are Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice, published in 1998, and Little Black Book of Stories, published in 2003.[1] Her books reflect a continuous interest in zoology, entomology, geology,[18] and Darwinism[3] among other repeated themes. She is also interested in linguistics and takes a keen interest in the translation of her books.[3] Byatt said: "I can't say how important it was to me when Angela 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 a Stevie Smith poetry reading, had dismissed Byatt's work, so this change of heart vindicated Byatt's approach to writing and Byatt readily acknowledged it.[3]

External audio
Listen to an interview with A. S. Byatt given to Fresh Air on WHYY-FM, 21 November 1991 (following publication of Possession; c. 15 minutes)[19]

Possession (1990) parallels the emerging relationship of two contemporary academics with the lives of two (fictional) 19th-century poets whom they are researching.[1] It won the 1990 Booker Prize and was adapted for a film released in 2002.[20]

Byatt's novella Morpho Eugenia was included in Angels & Insects (1992), which was turned into the eponymous 1995 film; that film received an Academy Award for Best Costume Design in 1997.[1][21]

Byatt's novel The 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.[3] 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 on Galton, Ibsen and Linnaeus.[3] Phineas Gilbert Nanson is named after an insect and is almost an anagram of Galton, Ibsen and Linnaeus, though Byatt said this was an "uncanny" coincidence that she did not realise until afterwards.[3]

The Children's Book, published in 2009, is a novel spanning from 1895 until the end of the First World War, centring on the fictional writer Olive Wellwood.[12] She is based upon E. Nesbit.[13] Another character — Herbert Methley — is a combination of H. G. Wells and D. H. Lawrence, according to Byatt.[13] The novel also features Rupert Brooke, Emma Goldman, Auguste Rodin, George Bernard Shaw, Virginia Woolf and Oscar Wilde, all appearing as themselves.[13] Byatt initially intended to title the book The Hedgehog, the White Goose and the Mad March Hare.[13]

Byatt said in 2009: "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."[7] Her preference for "making things" is also present in a 2003 interview, when she said: "I don't like to talk about creative writing, which is a vestigial religious tic in me. If anything is created, God does it. I don't. I make things--making is a nice word".[10]

She writes at her home in West London and at another house in the Cévennes in Southern France, where she spends her summers.[3][10] She does not write her fiction on a computer, she does so by hand, though she has deployed a computer for non-fiction articles.[3] According to a 1991 unpublished interview with the Los 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.[22]

Byatt wrote two critical studies of Dame Iris Murdoch, who was a friend, mentor and another significant influence on her own writing.[10] They were titled Degrees of Freedom: The Early Novels of Iris Murdoch (1965) and Iris Murdoch: A Critical Study (1976).[1] "[B]ecause I actually didn't want a mentor I found the friendship very difficult to handle... she simply used you as material", Byatt said. "She loved you very much but she would take you out to lunch and just fire questions at you like a clay pigeon shoot".[7] Byatt also described Murdoch's husband John 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... Feelings were in her work but it wasn't restricted to feelings. There was thought in it. There was structure in it. An intelligent, complicated world."[7]

Byatt's other critical studies include Wordsworth and Coleridge in Their Time (1970).[1] 2001's Portraits in Fiction is about painting in novels, and features references to Emile Zola, Marcel Proust and Iris Murdoch; Byatt had earlier touched upon this subject in a 2000 lecture she delivered at the National Portrait Gallery in London.[1]

She had no time for the so-called "angry young men", e.g. John Osborne and Kingsley Amis, and had little more time for Evelyn Waugh (though she considers him a superior artist to Amis), and, whilst she initially mistook Anthony Burgess for "another angry young man", she later realised her error and admitted he was "full of rich invention and a complete lack of narrowness".[3] Georgette Heyer's books she finds "deeply moving".[16]

Byatt has been a public encourager of the new young generation of British writers, including Philip Hensher (Kitchen Venom),[7][10] Robert Irwin (Exquisite Corpse),[10] A. L. Kennedy,[10] Lawrence Norfolk,[7][10] David Mitchell (Ghostwritten),[7][10] Ali Smith (Hotel World),[7][10] Zadie Smith (White Teeth)[10] and Adam 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 of Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan and Graham Swift — then added, "In fact I admire all four of those writers... they don't only do people's feelings... nevertheless it's become ossified".[7] Norfolk she described in 2003 as "the best of the young novelists now writing".[10] She also spoke of her admiration for American writer Helen DeWitt's book The Last Samurai.[10] 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. This is where I think she fights with Kingsley Amis".[7]

Questioned about whether her writing was "gendered", Byatt responded:

"I've played with trying to understand what the word means, but use either "sex" or "men and women" instead, partly because the word gendered has caused a great many of my friends to write work that is bordering on not saying anything. I have always had a romantic idea that the writer or the artist was, as Coleridge and Virginia Woolf said, androgynous. The whole of The Virgin in the Garden quartet is about the desirability of an androgynous mind. I am too old for the women's movement in America or this country. I was fighting battles for the freedom of women, all by myself as I saw it, in the Fifties. I was partly amazed by the organised fight and partly appalled, because freedoms it had been hard for us to win--to be taken seriously by men as equal people to talk to--were suddenly thrown away by the idea that women should band together and talk to each other about each other, about women, and have Women's Studies in women's buildings. I learnt never to write a list of my favourite painters or writers without women in, but equally I would never write one without men in. I don't think you can live in the world if the battle between the sexes is more important than communication between the sexes. It never was, to me--I like men. My father was one of the most important presences in my life and he was rational and sane and liked women".[10]

Byatt has been a judge on many literary award panels, including the Betty Trask Award, the David Higham Prize for Fiction,[23] the Hawthornden Prize and the Booker.[1] She has also written for media, including for The Times Literary Supplement, British journal Prospect and newspapers The Guardian, The Independent and The Sunday Times.[1][24][25]

The following books form a tetralogy known as The Quartet: The Virgin in the Garden (1978), Still Life (1985), Babel Tower (1996) and A Whistling Woman (2002).[1]

• 1964 – Shadow of a Sun, Chatto & Windus[1] reprinted in 1991 with originally intended title The Shadow of the Sun[3]
• 1967 – The Game, Chatto & Windus[1]
• 1978 – The Virgin in the Garden, Chatto & Windus[1]
• 1985 – Still Life, Chatto & Windus[1]
• 1990 – Possession: A Romance, Chatto & Windus[1]
• 1996 – Babel Tower, Chatto & Windus[1]
• 2000 – The Biographer's Tale, Chatto & Windus[1]
• 2002 – A Whistling Woman, Chatto & Windus[1]
• 2009 – The Children's Book, Chatto & Windus[7]
• 2011 – Ragnarok: The End of the Gods, Canongate ISBN 9780802120847[1]

• 1987 – Sugar and Other Stories, Chatto & Windus[1]
• 1993 – The Matisse Stories, Chatto & Windus[1]
• 1994 – The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye, Chatto & Windus[1]
• 1998 – Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice, Chatto & Windus[1]
• 2003 – Little Black Book of Stories, Chatto & Windus[1]

• 1992 – Angels and Insects, Chatto & Windus; comprises a pair of novellas:[1]
  • Morpho Eugenia[1]
  • The Conjugial Angel[1]

• 1965 – Degrees of Freedom: The Early Novels of Iris Murdoch, Chatto & Windus[1]
• 1970 – Wordsworth and Coleridge in their Time, Nelson[1]
• 1976 – Iris Murdoch: A Critical Study, Longman[1]
• 1989 – Unruly Times: Wordsworth and Coleridge, Poetry and Life, Hogarth Press[1]
• 1991 – Passions of the Mind: Selected Writings, Chatto & Windus[1]
• 1995 – Imagining Characters: Six Conversations about Women Writers (with Ignes Sodre), Chatto & Windus[1]
• 2000 – On Histories and Stories: Selected Essays, Chatto & Windus[1]
• 2001 – Portraits in Fiction, Chatto & Windus[1]
• 2016 – Peacock & Vine: On William Morris and Mariano Fortuny, Knopf ISBN 978-1101947470[1]

• 1989 – George Eliot: Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings (editor with Nicholas Warren), Penguin[1]
• 1995 – New Writing Volume 4 (editor with Alan Hollinghurst), Vintage[1]
• 1997 – New Writing Volume 6 (editor with Peter Porter), Vintage[1]
• 1998 – Oxford Book of English Short Stories (editor), Oxford University Press[1]
• 2001 – The Bird Hand Book (with photographs by Victor Schrager), Graphis Inc. (New York)[1]