s anyone who has read her previous novels, including ''Shadow of a Sun,'' or her stories or her critical studies knows, the British writer A. S. Byatt is a gifted observer, able to discern the exact but minor details that bring whole worlds into being. ''Possession'' begins in 1986 in the Reading Room of the London Library, where Roland Mitchell - a postdoctoral research assistant at London University and the novel's hero of sorts - is rummaging through an old book that once belonged to the man he worships: Randolph Henry Ash, a famous Victorian poet and obvious stand-in for Robert Browning.
Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit contains ‘unexpected, wonderful’ words.
AS Byatt: Beatrix Potter and the beginnings of my need to be a writer
This year’s Erasmus prize winner celebrates the transcendent use of language by Beatrix Potter, Magritte and Shakespeare
AS Byatt
Saturday 17 December 2016
S
torytelling is part of most people’s lives, almost from the moment we can understand language at all. Family tales, fairy stories, popular history, news and gossip are integral parts of human life. When I taught literature at University College London I was lucky enough to be invited to sit in the Senior Common Room bar with the artists from the Slade School of Art. I started to think about the fact that they worked with concrete materials – clay, stone, paint, film – whereas what I work with is the language we also use to conduct our daily lives.
In Fortuny’s footsteps … Antonia Byatt in Venice. Photograph: Fabrizio Giraldi
REVIEW
Peacock and Vine by AS Byatt review – Mariano Fortuny and William Morris, masters of design
Byatt teases out the similarities and contrasts between two multifaceted makers, who each gave their name to famous brands, in this late-life meditation on the values of art
Fiona MacCarthy Friday 1 June 2016
All admirers of AS Byatt’s writing are aware of her profound intellectual awareness of the visual coexisting with an almost childlike delight in the colours and tactilities of everyday life. Think back to the beginning of the great quartet of novels that feature Frederica Potter. The first of these, The Virgin in the Garden, opens with that glittering and sensuous 1960s party set in the National Portrait Gallery. Byatt’s short stories, like her novels, invent narratives in which art is of the essence. TheMatisse Stories especially come to mind.
AS Byatt, seen here visiting the campus of Newnham College, her alma mater,
was ‘a quintessential bluestocking and unrepentant intellectual’.
Photograph: Ian Cook/
AS Byatt: a life defined by literature
The Booker prizewinning novelist, who has died aged 87, was intelligent, curious – and warmly supportive of younger writers
Lisa Allardice
Friday 17 November 2023
It was always a joy to receive an email from the Booker prizewinning novelist AS Byatt. It might range from Nietzsche to newts to the weather in northern France (where she had a house) to the splitting migraine she’d had since Tuesday and why some writer was completely misguided about something or other. But no, she was dreadfully sorry, but she couldn’t write anything because she was deep in a novel of her own. And PS have I read the new novel from [insert name of as yet unheard-of novelist], it is really terrifically good.
‘If you tell a strong story, you can include anything else you need to include’ … AS Byatt, pictured in 2011. Photograph: Murdo Macleod
AS Byatt, author and critic, dies aged 87
The acclaimed author of novels including Possession and The Children’s Book, has died, her publisher has confirmed
Richard Lea and Ella Creamer
Friday 17 November 2023
The writer and critic AS Byatt, who explored family, myth and narrative in a career spanning six decades, has died aged 87. Her publisher Chatto & Windus confirmed that she died peacefully at home surrounded by close family.
A. S. Byatt lives and writes in her handsome west London house and, in the summer months, in her house in the south of France. Both are filled with art, predominantly by her contemporaries, libraries of extravagant, Borgesian range and curiosa of many kinds, hinting at her unusual fecundity of mind: exotic preserved insects, the intricate examples of Venetian millefiori glassware and objects rare and fascinating of all imaginable varieties. The impression given by her houses is confirmed by her conversation, which moves confidently between literature, biology, the fine arts, and theoretical preoccupations and displays a mind turned always outwards. She is not a writer one can imagine being tempted to write a memoir: solipsism is not in her nature.
David Mitchell's new novel of interlinked narratives, Cloud Atlas, takes the reader on a rollercoaster ride, says AS Byatt. And you won't want to get off
AS Byatt Saturdady 6 March 2004
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell 544pp, Sceptre, £16.99
David Mitchell entices his readers on to a rollercoaster, and at first they wonder if they want to get off. Then - at least in my case - they can't bear the journey to end. Like Scheherazade, and like serialised Victorian novels and modern soaps, he ends his episodes on cliffhangers and missed heartbeats. But unlike these, he starts his next tale in another place, in another time, in another vocabulary, and expects us to go through it all again. Trust the tale. He reaches a cumulative ending of all of them, and then finishes them all individually, giving a complete narrative pleasure that is rare.
Narrative tricks minted in the 19th century are still working in contemporary fiction by authors from Margaret Atwood to Sarah Waters
Paraic O’Donnell Wed 7 Nov 2018 10.00 GMT
I
n historical fiction, as in all things, fashions come and go. As we near the end of Hilary Mantel’s glorious Tudor revival, the ancient world is again getting a look in, with writers such as Madeline Miller and Pat Barker refashioning the Homeric epics to glittering effect. But these trends mask more durable patterns, at least from a crudely chronological point of view.
For one thing, the 19th century – the Regency and Victorian eras, in other words – remains vastly overrepresented. In an informal 2013 survey by the Historical Novel Society, it accounted for almost 30% of that year’s titles, second only to the 20th in popularity, and with almost as large a share as all other eras put together. What accounts for this enduring fascination? Proximity plays a part, naturally, and the richness of the documentary record probably doesn’t hurt either. Empires need prodigious bureaucracies, and if there’s one thing the Victorians were spectacularly good at, it was writing things down.
For my part – well, I won’t lie. Some of it comes down to aesthetics. In The House on Vesper Sands, I wanted to dramatise wickedness and secrecy. For that you need darkness, snow and plenty of orphans. More high-mindedly, I wanted to rehabilitate the Victorian sensation novel, in which – long before the modernists thought of it – the author’s own trickery is playfully advertised. In other words – and each of the books I’ve chosen reflects this in one way or another – the Victorians didn’t just perfect the English novel. They made it self-aware.
While literary critics have occasionally embraced historical fiction, academic literary theorists have taken a harder line. They take a dim view of representing things generally, but especially of representing the past. This novel isn’t just aware of all this; it gleefully writes it into the plot. Its intricate parallel narratives involve a pair of fusty academics who discover both a secret affair between two Victorian poets and a hesitant passion of their own. The resulting novel (or rather, “romance”, both in the literary sense and the usual one) manages to be both extravagantly learned and utterly charming.
2. Bodies of Light by Sarah Moss (2014)
Since this novel’s appearance in 2014, Moss’s star has rightfully risen. Bodies of Light deserves consideration alongside her finest work, and exhibits her peculiar gift for slipping among disparate settings (from Greenland to the Outer Hebrides) while maintaining unusual strands of continuity. Here again she is preoccupied with motherhood and the fragility of the self, and while her Victorian foray begins with the unearthing of infant bones, she is always digging into the human soul, including – or so it can often seem – the reader’s own.
3. The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber (2002)
This justly celebrated reinvention of the Dickensian novel is not so much a reboot as a kick in the arse. Unlike Dickens, Faber has no time for the sanctified waif or the virtuous simpleton. As in Bleak House, we are introduced first to the city itself, with a warning that we must start at the very bottom. In Faber’s London, the fog hides nothing and the veils are all drawn back. Here a prostitute squats unceremoniously over her bowl to scour herself, while outside the blood runs among the cobbles “like a winding crimson weed”.
Lesbian love story primer ... Elaine Cassidy (left) and Sally Hawkins in the 2005 TV adaptation of Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith. Photograph: BBC/Sally Head Productions
4. Fingersmith by Sarah Waters (2002)
A landmark of lesbian fiction, this suffered the unusual fate of becoming famous for the wrong reasons. The novel’s central love story should never be whitewashed, but it spawned a cottage industry of softcore Victoriana that overshadowed its author’s virtuosity. With its loveable rogues and dastardly schemes, Fingersmith has all the elements of the worst kind of knockabout pastiche, yet what Waters fashions from them is almost miraculous. From intricate plotting to exquisitely subtle observation, she is that rare prodigy: an author who is good at everything. Like her heroine, Sue, we see as a small child does “what I had never seen before – how the world was made up”.
Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchett in the title roles of the film version of Oscar and Lucinda.
5. Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey (1988)
The unlikely love story that begins when Lucinda Leplastrier encounters Oscar Hopkins on a ship bound for Australia has become one of the most cherished of recent times. Yet it is a love story, Carey has confessed, that he ended up writing almost by mistake. Instead, the novel’s glittering and unforgettable central motif, a glass church floating on a river, had struck Carey as crystallising (if you will) Pascal’s notion of religious belief as a grand gamble. Oscar is an inveterate gambler, of course, but if he accepts Lucinda’s bet out of compulsion, agreeing to transport her fragile edifice into the remote outback, his persistence in this harebrained undertaking has given us one of literature’s most monumental acts of love.
6. Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood (1996)
Atwood has always given us big ideas, but she hasn’t always shown as much interest in people. Alias Grace is as much a novel of ideas as any she has written, but is centred for once on a transfixing study of character. Grace Marks was a real (and notorious) historical character, an Irish maid convicted in 1843 of a brutal double murder. While brilliantly dramatising the Victorian urge to medicalise femininity, this novel dignifies its central character even as it wrings from the question of her guilt a merciless degree of suspense.
Michael Caine and Hugh Jackman in The Prestige. Photograph: Stephen Vaughan/AP
7. The Prestige by Christopher Priest (1995)
Christopher Nolan’s darkly glamorous film version made this the best known of Priest’s books. While it did justice to the novel’s duelling Victorian stage magicians, it jettisoned its contemporary framing and, in doing so, much of its psychological subtlety. In Priest’s original telling, the historical rivals are discovered by a down-on-his-luck writer named Andrew Westley. As the magicians stalk one another, each maddened by the mystery of the other’s “prestige” (or trick), Westley is haunted by a phantom twin, and it is the reader who must discover the true nature of the illusion.
8. The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton (2013)
Set in the New Zealand of the 1860s, this novel transports us not to the midst of Victoria’s reign but to the very periphery of her possessions, a disparity that Catton’s immense novel ingeniously exploits. Taking on the guise of a genteel pastiche, its customs seem familiar at first, but we soon find ourselves in unmapped territory. The intricate plot (involving a vanished prospector, a missing fortune and an ailing prostitute) is absorbing but becomes almost incidental, with Catton’s fiendish use of omniscient perspective purporting to show us everything while keeping us artfully in the dark.
9. Master Georgie by Beryl Bainbridge (1998)
Shortlisted for the Booker prize five times, it was not until after her death in 2010 thatBainbridge was finally honoured with a specially created award. Although it was chosen from among her novels by a popular vote, Master Georgie is one of Bainbridge’s most challenging and austere works. Indeed, she herself remarked that most people needed to read it three times before they understood it. She may have been right. With its carefully modulated perspectives and slyly observed details, this refracted Bildungsroman follows a young surgeon’s almost helpless progress towards the muck and depravity of the Crimean war, and it reveals new and brilliant facets no matter how often you come back to it.
10. The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds (2009)
Set in Epping Forest in 1840, The Quickening Maze examines the unlikely circumstances that brought the poets John Clare and Alfred Tennyson into brief conjunction. Clare’s alcoholism and declining artistic fortunes have brought him to High Beach Asylum, while the young and untested Tennyson, a guest of the asylum-keeper, is so self-absorbed that he scarcely notices the amorous attentions of his host’s young daughter. Animating such looming and disparate figures could have made for heavy going, but Foulds gives them human scale and careful shading, illuminating all he touches with his swift and shimmering prose.
Alice Munro: AS Byatt, Anne Enright and Colm Tóibín hail the Nobel laureate
'Alice Munro is one of the greatest living writers, but she has always seemed to be almost a secret. Now everyone will know'
AS Byatt, Anne Enright and Colm Tóibín
THE GUARDIAN, Friday 11 October 2013
AS Byatt
This is the Nobel announcement that has made me happiest in the whole of my life. I remember reviewing Alice Munro in the Toronto Globe and Mail and saying she was as great as Chekhov, and the Canadians were surprised but happy. She has done more for the possibilities and the form of the short story than any other writer I know. You can never tell what she is going to say next – or what you the reader are going to feel next – from line to line. She appears to be in perfect control of her writing, but I interviewed her onstage once and she described how she writes enormously long versions of stories and then cuts them into shape. I admire this immensely. One of my favourite moments in her fiction comes in a story where a woman thinks of her day and then of her life as a series of things that have got to be done and are done: "not much to her credit to go through her life thinking, Well good, now that's over, that's over. What was she looking forward to, what bonus was she hoping to get, when this, and this, and this, was over?" One of her great gifts is recognising these peculiar – in some ways ludicrous – rhythms of mental life.
Is it possible to love a novel for all the wrong reasons? Yesterday, I finished A.S. Byatt's Possession (1990) for the first time—"a romance" (the front cover tells me), "an intellectual mystery and triumphant love story" (the back cover continues) about "a pair of young scholars researching the lives of two Victorian poets." Jay Parini's New York Times review of the award-winning novel describes its mass of fictional research material—a completely fabricated trace of poems, letters, diaries, and scholarly biographical excerpts—as its "most dazzlingly aspect." While this artificial archive is certainly impressive and no doubt brilliantly composed and arranged as a counterpoint to the main plot, I confess that I fall into the camp of bad readers who skimmed the letters and diaries and often skipped the poetry altogether. I found it difficult to invest my time and mental energy in this material, especially since most of that energy is currently going toward research projects of my own or class prep for the upcoming fall semester. Although I enjoyed Byatt's style and the novel's plot, characters/caricatures, and settings (and I am certainly interested in reading her Lawrentian quartet), I just didn't—couldn't—care about the affair between Chistabel LaMotte and Randolph Henry Ash.
As I scroll through the Goodreads reviews, I find myself chastised, "READ THE POETRY, PEOPLE!" and left out of what, for many readers, appears to have been a profound, transformative experience. And yet I'm beginning to wonder what sort of ideal reader the novel itself presumes. It seems to me that Possession's ideal reader is a patient student who will slow their pace when appropriate (a three-page poem does not read as quickly as three pages of narrative, after all; letters or diaries do not function dramatically the way realist dialogue does). Byatt's ideal reader is also a detective who, like its main characters, will search epigraphs and long lost research material for clues or echoes that amplify the novel's plot and ideas (about love, death, literary studies, public funding, Anglo-American difference, etc.). Maybe I resisted this role, since I was not looking to study this novel or to become the sort of academic sleuth exemplified by Maud Bailey, Roland Michell, and others. (I'm neither an archivist nor a researcher on a heroic quest for solutions to mysteries.) And maybe I resisted for good reason, since the novel itself seems ambivalent about the value of its ideal reader (who is doubled and tripled by its characters). Indeed, the obsessive and possessive investment of its characters in uncovering the truth of what happened between these poets—especially when seen through the non-academic eyes of family members or journalists—looks overinflated, self-centered, or misdirected. Even the plot must personalize the truth of the LaMotte–Ash affair; in the end, this postmodern Dickensian novel is really all about the discovery of a major character's familial connection to the very mysteries driving her.
And so I'm left with a few questions: How does one depict or explain an academic's attachment to their subject of study? Is "possession"—ownership of an object, of a copyright, of a favorite author, of a field of study, of a lover, of a future—the most convincing metaphor? Reading on . . .