What Book to Read?

Antonia Susan Byatt (1936- ) was born in Sheffield, England, eldest of three children in a scholarly, middle class family. Her father, John Drabble, a barrister and later a county court judge, wrote novels in his spare time. Her younger sister Margaret Drabble is also a successful writer. They both went to the Mount School, York, a Quaker boarding-school, and both went to Newnham College, Cambridge, to study English literature. Antonia graduated in 1957, and did two years of postgraduate study at Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania, and at Oxford. In 1959, she married Ian Byatt, and they had two children, one of whom died in a road accident aged eleven. They divorced in 1969, and she married Peter Duffy; they had two more children.  During these years, she worked as a part-time lecturer at the University of London and the Central School of Art and Design, teaching English and Liberal Studies. In 1972 she became a tenured lecturer in English and American Literature, later senior lecturer at University College, London and remained there until 1983, when she left to write full-time.

Throughout the early years of motherhood and part-time teaching, Byatt had also been writing.  In 1964 her first novel, The Shadow of the Sun, was published.  It is a story about a young woman who struggles to discover and develop her own personality in the shadow of her father, a renowned British novelist. Writing about writing and writers is one of the ongoing themes of her work. Her second book, The Game (1967) established a second common theme – the relationship between sisters. In this case one is an Oxford academic, and the other a best-selling novelist, and their relationship leads to violence and death.  By 1967, her sister Margaret had published three books, A Summer Bird Cage (1964), The Garrick Year (1964) The Millstone (1965), a fourth, Jerusalem the Golden appearing in 1967. The sisters’ relationship was never close; ‘There was too much competition,’ Byatt says of their childhood. ‘We didn’t get on’. Drabble explains the continuing rift as beginning when Byatt’s son was killed – and the ‘unassuageable guilt’ she, Margaret, experienced knowing that her own children were safe. Byatt has also said she was angered at Drabble’s treatment of a character who was clearly based on their mother in one of her books.  (Some sources say that the two are half sisters, but others make no mention of this.  Biographical details appear to show them as having the same parents, and neither of them has commented publicly on the matter.) 

There was a gap of some years until her next novel, though she published a number of academic studies in literature in these years. Juggling work and family led her, like many others, to feel ‘when you’re a woman, that you start with one hand tied behind your back’.

In 1978, The Virgin in the Garden was published, and again takes up the theme of family – and sisters’ – relationships. This time another young girl, Frederica Potter, is seeking to find her own identity. This is the first of four novels about Frederica and her family, spread over the next twenty-five years. Frederica’s relationship with her sister is much more accepting, but in the second of the series, Still Life (1985) the sister dies in a domestic accident. The effects of this on Frederica’s life are explored, among other things, in Babel Tower (1996), and, The Whistling Woman (2002) follows Frederica into her thirties. These are dense and complex books, in which Byatt’s interest in ideas, particularly ideas about the role of art and literature in people’s lives, are fully explored. The early books were well received by critics, but didn’t make her widely known.

The book that established her fame was Possession: A Romance (1990). This is a book about two romances, a twentieth century one, and a nineteenth century one. Roland is a young research associate working on the life and writing of a nineteenth century poet, Randolph Ash.  He finds a fragment of a letter from Ash which suggests the beginnings of a previously unknown relationship between him and a female poet, who Ronald soon discovers to be Cristobel La Motte.  He meets Maud Bailey, a feminist academic who is working on La Motte, and together they set out to discover what happened. Interspersed with the modern account of discovery and the development of the relationship between Roland and Maude, we find out some of what actually took place between Ash and La Motte.

The book is often called a ‘pastiche’; it contains a mixture of ordinary modern narrative, mostly from Roland’s point of view, nineteenth century style narrative, letters, journal entries, a fairy story, poetry and chunks of feminist literary criticism and theory.  Most readers feel the other different and add to the pleasure of the book.  

 Possession won the Booker Prize in 1990.

Byatt’s most recent novel is The Children’s Book, which explores the lives of the family and friends of Olive Wellwood, a writer of children’s stories. Set in the years leading up to the First World War, the ‘golden age’ of Edwardian England has a decidedly leaden touch to it. Hugely detailed, it perhaps lacks the lightness of Possession, but is a must read for fans of Byatt’s other novels.

Byatt does not shy away from the fact that she loves ideas; ‘intellectual passions are as vibrant and consuming as emotional ones’, she says. One critic said of Possession that is ‘teeming with more ideas that a year’s worth of ordinary novels’. The characters think hard about some serious issues. ‘Perhaps the most important thing to say about my books’ says Byatt, ‘is that they try to be about the life of the mind as well as of society and the relations between people … I see writing and thinking as a passionate activity, like any other’. Some of her later books seem to have taken her fascination with ideas to an extreme, so that they dominate the story. Byatt is very aware – even if her writing sometimes suggests otherwise – that ‘Art does not exist for politics, or for instruction – it exists primarily for pleasure’. 

Byatt’s novels are:

The Shadow of the Sun (1964)

The Game (1967)

The Virgin in the Garden (1978)

Still Life (1985)

Possession: A Romance (1990)

Angels and Insects (1992)

The Matisse Stories (1993)

Babel Tower (1996)

The Biographer’s Tale (2000)

The Whistling Woman (2002)

The Children’s Book (2009)

Visit Byatt’s website here.