B is for Byatt

B is for Byatt

"A book starts when two things you thought were different come together."

–– A.S. Byatt, The Guardian, Interviewed by Sam Leith, 2/24/09

A.S. Byatt was born on August 24, 1936, in Sheffield, England. One of Britain's preeminent writers, she is the author of critical studies, short story collections, and many acclaimed novels. Byatt’s
novel Possession, set in Victorian England, won the Booker Prize in 1990.  Among her other novels are those comprising the quartet The Virgin in the Garden (1978), Still Life (1985), Babel Tower (1996), and A Whistling Woman (2002); Byatt’s quartet narrates the story of Frederica Potter, her family and her friends at university across several decades of the 20^th century.  Byatt’s 2009 novel The Children’s Book, loosely based on the life of children’s writer Edith Nesbit, was short-listed for the Booker Prize. Byatt taught English and American literature at University College, London, and reviews new literature. Perhaps not unlike one of her characters, Byatt comes from a family of creative, intelligent, and possibly driven women. Her sisters are novelist Margaret Drabble and art historian Helen Langdon; their mother was Browning scholar Kathleen Bloor, wife of John Drabble CC.

In her fiction, Byatt develops her affinity with the cultural and intellectual preoccupations of Victorian era England, and shrewdly analyzes British society from the 1950s onward, focusing on women’s changing place within that society. Overall, her writing discloses a complex relation between illusion and reality. A wry critic of utopian ideals and castles-in-the-air social projects, she nevertheless suggests a place for fantasy in the life of the individual, where illusion can become a legitimate alternative to the harshness of reality.

For all the sophistication of her metafiction, Byatt is a meticulous realist. Her skill in representing reality, her pleasure in storytelling, are on display in this passage from one of her early novels:

Frederica, entering Long Royston for the first time, did not take to it. She had meant to.

It was a step, several steps, up and out of Blesford. Like Everest, climbed this year, it had always been there, but inaccessible. Now, invited by its owner, she walked across its gardens, planted, according to Crowe’s instructions, more or less in accordance with Francis Bacon’s prescriptions in his essay “Of Gardens”. It was a hideous grey spring, that year, but Bacon’s April flowers, in walled gardens, were struggling out. 

Bacon liked the breath of flowers on the air. Frederica breathed in: the double white violet; the wallflower; the stock-gillyflower; the cowslip; flower-delices and lilies of all natures; rosemary flowers; the tulippa; the  double piony; the pale daffadil; the French honeysuckle; the cherry tree in blossom; the dammasin and plum tree in blossom; the white-thorn in leaf; the lilac tree. It was all in the guide-book, issued with pretty drawings when the gardens were thrown open at Easter and in June. You may, said Bacon, have ver perpetuum, as the place affords.  Even in North Yorkshire, though the moorland winds do softly ruffle. Frederica crunched along the terrace gravel, on which later the play was to be enacted. The breath of flowers is far sweeter in the air than in the hand. Wallflowers are very delightful to be set under a parlour or low chamber window. They were. But those which perfume the air most delightfully, not passed by as the rest, but being trodden on and crushed, are three: that is, burnet, wild thyme, and watermints. Therefore you are to set whole alleys of them, to have the pleasure, when you walk or tread. Crowe had provided that pleasure. Frederica saw other people walking and treading in pleached alleys planted with these things, known faces, unknown faces, familiar from photographs and posters. The revels are now beginning, she told herself.

   When she got in she was less happy. There was a white-coated butler, who took her macintosh and her name: there was Crowe, who said “how lovely” and passed on: there was a young man in a peacock corduroy jacket, studying a carving, half his face hidden behind huge tinted aquamarine lenses. She thought what she felt was social unease – alarm at being unable to impress herself on this knot of highly articulate, loudly fluting, brilliantly mobile creatures. Social unease always made her aggressive. Later, she wondered if what daunted her was not Long Royston itself.

“In the Humanist’s House,” Chapter 13, The Virgin in the Garden