A S Byatt

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Byatt, Dame A. S., ( Dame Antonia Susan Byatt) (1936– ), novelist and critic, born in Sheffield, and educated at Newnham College, Cambridge. Her early novels include Shadow of a Sun (1964) and The Game (1967). The Virgin in the Garden (1978) is set largely in the coronation year of 1953; rich in complex allegorical allusions to Spenser, Ralegh, Shakespeare, and others, the novel also provides a vivid portrait of provincial life in the 1950s; the story continues in Still Life (1985), Babel Tower (1996), and A Whistling Woman (2002). Possession (1990, Booker Prize) concerns a group of 20th-cent. academics who reconstruct the relationship between two (fictitious) Victorian poets. The novel is remarkable for its convincing pastiches of 19th-cent. literary style. Other works include Sugar and Other Stories (1987); Angels and Insects (1992), containing two novellas set in the mid-19th cent.; The Matisse Stories (1993), a three-story sequence loosely linked to paintings by Henri Matisse; The Biographer's Tale (2000); and The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye (1994), a collection of original fairy stories. The novelist M. Drabble is her sister.

A. S. Byatt (Antonia Susan Byatt) , 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. Her novella Angels and Insects (1992) and her novel The Biographer's Tale (2001) both examine Victorian times with a contemporary sensibility, while her sweeping later novel, The Children's Book (2009), tells of a writer, her family, and the wider world during years from the late 19th cent. through World War I. Byatt 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).

Bibliography: See studies by K. C. Kelly (1996), A. Alfer and M. J. Noble, ed. (2001), C. Franken (2001), L. Hadley (2008), and L. Steveler (2009).

Byatt, A.S. ( Antonia Susan) (1936– ) English novelist and critic, sister of Margaret Drabble. Byatt was primarily an academic literary scholar until the publication of her third novel, The Virgin in the Garden (1978). Possession, a literary mystery story and romance spanning two centuries, won the 1990 Booker Prize. She has written studies of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Iris Murdoch. Other work includes the novellas Angels and Insects (1993) and The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye (1994). She received a CBE in 1990.