AS Byatt, The Author Of Possession And The Children's Book, Has Died

The English author AS Byatt.

Antonia Susan Duffy, the author who signed her novels as AS Byatt and gave them an intellectual significance that kept the general public away from her work for years – until the international success of “Possession” in 1990 – is said to be aged 87 reported to have died years ago. Editor Chatto & Windus reported this Friday.

In the first half of her literary career, which spanned five decades, her books were minority works that lacked what she described as “narrative greed or gluttony,” that is, the reader’s desire to advance the plot. Success came when AS Byatt, inspired by the sales phenomenon The Name of the Rose by the Italian Umberto Eco, dared to play with metafiction and the detective plot in Possession, the novel that made her a star. The parallel story of two romances, the story of two Victorian-era poets invented by the author who wrote long letters and poems attributed to their characters, and two contemporary academics who examine and trace this relationship, won recognition and unanimous admiration from critics. In 1990, AS Byatt won the Booker Prize, the most prestigious British literary prize, for this book.

For many of his followers, another, even better book was due to appear in 2009: The Children’s Book, which was created under the pretext of the complex internal relationships between two families, that of a children’s book author and that of a ceramist, between the end of the 19th century and the end of the First World War examines the changes in social customs and all political ideas – socialists, anarchists, Marxists, suffragists… – of a deeply turbulent era in Europe. She is also the author of the text Angels and Insects, which was made into a film in 1995 starring Kristin Scott Thomas and Patsy Kensit. The one by Possession with Gwyneth Paltrow at the helm was released in 2002. And the one by Three Thousand Years Waiting for You with Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba in 2022.

Her birth name in 1936 was Antonia Drabble. He grew up between Sheffield and York in England and studied at the universities of Cambridge, Oxford and Bryn Mawr College in Philadelphia (USA). In 1959 she married Ian Byatt, a renowned economist, from whom she adopted his surname as her stage name, with whom she had two children. Ten years later she divorced, remarried Peter Duffy and had two more daughters.

He taught literature at the University College of London until 1983, when sales of his books began to increase and he became more financially independent. AS Byatt was not only a writer but also a great literary critic who could illuminate and enliven any debate with her strong and controversial views. He even said of the writer Martin Amis, the enfant terrible of late 20th and early 21st century British literature, with whom he shared a publisher, that he was a “male peacock” after asking for an advance, which he probably wouldn’t reach. with your future sales. “I don’t understand why I should subsidize his greed just because he has to pay for a divorce and wants half of his teeth fixed,” he even said of the author. Referring to the great publishing success of the last few decades, the saga about the young wizard Harry Potter written by author JK Rowling, he said that it was an unoriginal and less ambitious work.

In 1972, his 11-year-old son Charles was killed by a drunk driver. As she said herself, paralyzed with sadness, she said to herself: “I can do two things. “Commit suicide or be interested in absolutely everything that surrounds me.” Behind this universal intellectual ambition lies the impulse of the four novels that make up the Federica Quartet, which began with “The Virgin in the Garden” and runs for hundreds of pages follows a Cambridge-educated woman making her way in a male-dominated world in the 1950s and 1960s. Each of the political or intellectual ideas that emerged in this historical period are reflected in the saga, to the point that some critics pointed out that the excess of information served to hide a lack of imagination. AS Byatt responded that her work was a reaction to the solipsism – me, me, me and only me – that she felt other writers of her time reflected. She preferred her characters to explore the world of art, philosophy or politics.

What AS Byatt never took kindly to was the constant comparison that the British press made between her and her sister Margaret Drabble, who in her time achieved faster and more widespread success as a writer than Antonia. Remembering the long rivalry of the two famous actress sisters, they referred to them and their stormy relationship as the Olivia de Havilland and Joan Fontaine of the literary world.

AS Byatt, who received the titles of Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) and Dame of the Order of the British Empire (DBE), as well as Knight of the French Order of Arts and Letters, as well as ten honorary doctorates each. He spent his time during his studies between his home in Putney (England) and the town of Cévennes in the south of France. A BBC documentary documented his summer stay at the villa, where he devoted himself constantly to writing and reading. Her husband was forbidden to go there. AS Byatt admitted several times that he liked books more than people.

AS Byatt, the author of Possession and The Children’s Book, has died

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