AS Byatt, one of the most ambitious writers of her generation, whose dazzling 1990 novel Possession won the Booker Prize and brought her international fame as a novelist and uncompromising intellectual, has died. She was 87.
Her longtime publisher Chatto & Windus announced the death in a statement Friday, saying she died at her home. It did not say where she lived or give a cause of death.
Ms. Byatt was a brilliant critic and scholar who broke new academic standards with the publication of eleven novels and six short story collections. “I’m not an academic who just happened to write a novel,” she fumed in a 1991 interview with the New York Times Magazine. “I’m a novelist who happens to be pretty good academically.”
Ms. Byatt’s intellectual passion was evident in “Possession.” Subtitled “A Romance,” it is a scientific detective story in which one story of illicit love is embedded in another: one couple lives in the Victorian era, the other in the late 20th century. The mystery begins to unfold when a young scholar discovers something extraordinary in the London library in 1985: old love letters hidden in a rare copy of Victorian poetry.
Investigating this love affair forces the two modern scholars who track her down to fall in love too. Along the way, Ms. Byatt pokes fun at the foibles of academia while effortlessly writing her own Victorian poems in the voices of her fictional protagonists.
“Possession” became an unexpected bestseller and was adapted into a feature film in 2002, directed by Neil LaBute and starring Gwyneth Paltrow. A novella from her book “Angels and Insects” (1992) was nominated for an Oscar by Philip Haas in 1995. Both film adaptations increased Ms. Byatt’s visibility as an author who broadened the range of contemporary British fiction.
“Possession” is a scientific detective story that nests one tale of illicit love within another. Photo credit: via Penguin Random House
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-volume series called the Frederica Potter Quartet.
Like Ms. Byatt, Frederica and her siblings came of age in mid-20th century England, when even well-educated women were expected to give up work when they married. Ms. Byatt’s greatest fear was being trapped in domesticity.
“I had this image,” Ms. Byatt told the Guardian in 2009, “of coming out from underneath, 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, the writer Margaret Drabble, whose debut novel, “A Summer Bird Cage” (1963), became an instant bestseller. When it was first published, Ms. Byatt told The Paris Review, she was more afraid of constant comparison with her better-known sister than bad reviews. While her early novels were generally received with respect, she said that some dismissed them as “another novel by someone like Margaret Drabble.”
The relationship between these fiercely competitive literary sisters was always strained. They did not read each other’s works or see each other often, which led to endless gossip in the literary press. Both sisters claimed their rivalry had been overstated, although Ms Byatt may have undermined this argument by dryly telling the BBC in 1991 that she and Ms Drabble had “on balance always liked each other”.
But in later years they found it more difficult to control themselves and tensions occasionally spilled out into the open.
When Ms Drabble, who survives her sister, published a semi-autobiographical book called The Pattern in the Carpet (2009), Ms Byatt told The Telegraph that she preferred people not to be her mother’s version of someone other people would read. Ms. Drabble replied that her sister was so territorial that she was offended when Ms. Drabble included a family tea set in one of her novels. In 2011, Ms Drabble told the Telegraph that their feud was beyond repair.
Ms. Byatt was born Antonia Susan Drabble on August 24, 1936, in Sheffield, England. Her father, John F. Drabble, a lawyer and judge, published two novels himself. Her mother, Kathleen (Bloor) Drabble, was a teacher and homemaker.
Antonia was the eldest child; Three years later Margaret was born, followed by two more siblings. Both parents had attended Cambridge University and expected the same from all four children, which they did.
But her mother openly favored Margaret, which added to the competition between the two older girls.
Ms Byatt described herself as an unhappy child who suffered from severe asthma and spent a lot of time in bed, where reading was her escape from a tense and angry household.
Ms. Byatt and Ms. Drabble were both sent to the Mount School, a Quaker boarding school in York, where their mother taught, and both went on to Newnham College, the women’s college in Cambridge, which their mother had attended. Ms. Byatt earned a “first” degree (with highest honors) in English in 1957, followed by a year of graduate study at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. She continued her doctoral studies at Somerville College, Oxford University, where her doctorate dissuaded her from writing fiction. Ms Byatt, who told her, recalled: “My dear, every young girl with a first-class degree expects to be able to write a good novel. None of them can.”
A novella from Ms. Byatt’s book “Angels and Insects” was adapted into an Oscar-nominated film by Philip Haas in 1995. Source: Penguin Random House
When she left Oxford in 1959 to marry the economist Ian Byatt, her academic fellowship was terminated; Men in similar circumstances did not lose their scholarships.
To her dismay, at the age of 25, Ms Byatt was relegated to the role of lecturer’s wife. But she persevered, writing with what she called intense desperation while caring for two young children.
The marriage ended in 1969. She married Peter John Duffy, an investment analyst, and had two more children.
Ms. Byatt continued to publish novels and critical studies, but then tragedy struck when her only son, Charles, was killed by a drunken driver at the age of 11. Ms Byatt had just accepted her first teaching position at University College London. “I think what saved me were the students,” she told the New York Times. “They were in another world; I had to switch gears.”
Although she never directly addressed the loss of her child in her novels, she said the experience changed her writing. “Suddenly I thought, ‘Why the hell isn’t there a happy ending?’” she recalled to The Paris Review. “Everyone knows they are artificial. Why not have that pleasure, like you have the pleasure of rhyme, like you have the pleasure of color?”
Ms. Byatt has written and edited numerous works of literary criticism, including two books on the British writer Iris Murdoch and one on the relationship between 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 a lecturer in English at University College.
While some of her writings, particularly her academic writings, have been criticized as being so dense as to be impenetrable, in 2008 she was included in the Times of London’s list of “The 50 Greatest British Authors Since 1945”.
Ms Byatt was made a Dame of the British Empire in 1999 for her contributions to contemporary English literature, although some of her most popular works were to follow.
Her novel The Children’s Book (2009), based on the life of popular children’s author E. Nesbitt, integrates fairy tales with social commentary on early 20th-century British utopian movements. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2009 and won the James Tait Black Prize in 2010. “A Stone Woman,” a widely anthologized story included in Ms. Byatt’s collection “Little Black Book of Stories” (2018), explores themes of grief and aging through a woman’s transformation into stone after her mother’s death.
Mrs. Byatt and her husband had three daughters. Complete information about the survivors was not immediately available.
By the time she was in her early 80s, Ms. Byatt felt she had accomplished much by simply becoming a writer.
“I think I was very lucky 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.”