AS Byatt, scholar who found literary fame in fiction, dies at 87
AS Byatt, one of the most ambitious writers of her generation, whose brilliant 1990 novel ‘Possession’ won the Booker Prize and brought her international fame as a novelist and unapologetic intellectual, has died. She was 87.
Her longtime publisher, Chatto & Windus, announced the death in a statement On Friday, she said she died at her home. It was not stated where she lived and no cause of death was given.
Ms. Byatt was a brilliant critic and scholar who broke the academic mold by publishing 11 novels and six collections of short stories. “I’m not an academic who happens to have written a novel,” she said in an interview with The New York Times Magazine in 1991. “I’m a novelist who happens to be a pretty good academic.”
Ms. Byatt’s intellectual passion was evident in “Possession.” Subtitled ‘A Romance’, it is a scientific detective story that nests one story of illicit love within another: one couple lives in the Victorian era, the other in the late 20th century. The mystery is set in motion when a young scientist discovers something special in the London Library in 1985: old love letters, hidden away in a rare edition of Victorian poetry.
Investigating this love affair forces the two modern scientists who track them down to fall in love too. Along the way, Ms. Byatt mocks the foibles of academia while effortlessly writing, in the voices of her fictional protagonists, her own Victorian poetry.
“Possession” became an unexpected bestseller and became a hit feature film in 2002, directed by Neil LaBute and starring Gwyneth Paltrow. A novella from her book “Angels and Insects” (1992) had previously been made into a film Oscar-nominated film in 1995 by Philip Haas. Both film adaptations increased Ms. Byatt’s visibility as an author who broadened the scope of contemporary British fiction.
Ms. Byatt built her literary reputation slowly and steadily with two early novels, “The Shadow of the Sun” (1964) and “The Game” (1967), followed by a four-part series known as the Frederica Potter Quartet.
Like Mrs. Byatt, Frederica and her siblings came of age in mid-20th century England, a period when even highly educated women were expected to stop working if they married. Mrs. Byatt’s greatest fear was that she was trapped in domesticity.
“I had this image,” Ms. Byatt told The Guardian in 2009, “coming from the bottom and seeing the light for a while and then being locked in a kitchen, which I think happened to a lot of women of my generation.”
Ms. Byatt’s early career was overshadowed by her younger sister, writer Margaret Drabble, whose debut novel, “A Summer Bird Cage” (1963), became an instant bestseller. When she first appeared, Ms Byatt told The Paris Review, she feared constant comparisons to her more famous sister more than bad reviews. Although her early fiction was generally respectfully received, she said some dismissed it as “another novel by someone who was more like Margaret Drabble.”
The relationship between these highly competitive literary sisters was always tense. They did not read each other’s work or see each other often, which resulted in endless gossip for the literary press. Both sisters insisted their rivalry was overblown, although Ms Byatt may have undermined that argument by speaking dryly. told the BBC in 1991 that she and Mrs. Drabble had “always liked each other.”
But in later years they had a harder time controlling themselves, and the tension occasionally spilled into the public consciousness.
When Mrs. Drabble, who survives her sister, published a semi-autobiographical book, “The Pattern in the Carpet” (2009), Ms Byatt told The Telegraph that she would rather people not read someone else’s version of her mother. Mrs. Drabble fired back that her sister was so territorial that she was offended when Mrs. Drabble included a family tea set in one of her novels. By 2011, Mrs Drabble told The Telegraph that their feud was beyond repair.
Mrs. Byatt was born Antonia Susan Drabble on August 24, 1936 in Sheffield, England. Her father, John F. Drabble, a lawyer and judge, self-published two novels. Her mother, Kathleen (Bloor) Drabble, was a teacher and homemaker.
Antonia was the eldest child; Margaret. was born three years later, and two more siblings followed. Both parents had gone to Cambridge University and expected all four of their children to do the same, which they did.
But their mother openly favored Margaret, which added to the competition between the two older girls.
Mrs. Byatt described herself as an unhappy child who suffered from severe asthma and spent a lot of time in bed, where reading became her escape from a tense and angry household.
Mrs. Byatt and Mrs. Drabble were both sent to the Mount School, a Quaker boarding school in York where their mother taught, and both attended Newnham College, the women’s college in Cambridge where their mother had attended. Mrs. Byatt received a “first” (highest degree) degree in English in 1957, followed by a year of graduate work at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. She continued her doctoral studies at Somerville College, Oxford University, where she completed her Ph.D. manager, who told her, Mrs. Byatt recalled: “My dear, every young girl with a first-class degree expects to write a good novel. None of them can.”
When she left Oxford in 1959 to marry Ian Byatt, an economist, her scholarship was terminated; men in similar circumstances did not lose their subsidies.
To her horror, at the age of 25, Ms. Byatt was demoted to the role of faculty wife. But she persevered, writing with what she described as intense desperation while caring for two young children.
The marriage ended in 1969. She subsequently married Peter John Duffy, an investment analyst, and had two more children.
Mrs. Byatt continued to publish novels and critical studies, but then tragedy struck when her only son, Charles, was killed at age 11 by a drunk driver. Ms Byatt had just taken up her first teaching position, at University College London. “I think what saved me was the students,” she told The New York Times. “They were in another world; I had to change gears.”
Although she never addressed the loss of her child directly in her fiction, she said the experience changed her writing. “I suddenly thought: why on earth don’t we have a happy ending?” she reminded The Paris Review. ‘Everyone knows they are artificial. Why not have this pleasure, as you have the pleasure of rhyme, as you have the pleasure of color?
Ms. Byatt wrote and edited many literary criticisms, including two books on the British writer Iris Murdoch and one on the relationship of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. She also edited a book of essays on George Eliot with Nicholas Warren. From 1972 to 1983 she was senior lecturer in English at University College.
Although some of her writings, particularly her academic writings, were criticized for being so dense as to be impenetrable, in 2008 she was included in the Times of London list of the ‘50 Greatest British Authors Since 1945.”
Mrs. Byatt was named Dame of the British Empire in 1999 for her contributions to contemporary English literature, although some of her most popular works were still to come.
Her novel “The Children’s Book” (2009), based on the life of popular children’s author E. Nesbitt, integrates fairy tales into social commentary on British utopian movements of the early 20th century. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2009 and received the award James Tait Black Prize in 2010. ‘A stone woman’, a widespread story which was included in Ms. Byatt’s collection “Little Black Book of Stories” (2018), explores themes of grief and aging through a woman’s metamorphosis into stone after the death of her mother.
Mrs. Byatt and her husband had three daughters. Complete information about survivors was not immediately available.
By the time she was in her early eighties, Ms. Byatt felt she had accomplished much simply by becoming a writer.
“I think I was very lucky for most of my life because I expected not to be able to write books.” she said in a 2016 interview. “And I never really wanted to do anything else.”