Dame Antonia Susan Duffy (b.1936,) née Drabble, known professionally as A. S. Byatt, is a British scholar, literary critic, and novelist. Her literature is notable for her historical and literary allusion and pastiche. Byatt is the elder sister of the British novelist Margaret Drabble; their sibling rivalry is long-standing and renowned.
Born to an intellectual family in Sheffield, Lincolnshire, Byatt was educated at Newnham College, Cambridge. For 25 years, she worked as a teacher and a mother and wrote several novels and critical works. She made her reputation as a novelist with her third novel, The Virgin in the Garden (1978.)
Byatt’s best-known work is the literary mystery-romance story Possession (1990; Booker Prize) about a pair of contemporary literary scholars who fall in love as they discover a previously unknown romance between their 19th-century objects of study. Much of the storyline of Possession is conveyed through poetry, letters, and diary extracts; Byatt composed dozens of poems in an authentic Victorian voice for the two Victorian lovers.
Byatt’s volumes of short stories include The Matisse Stories (1994,) The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye (1995,) and Little Black Book of Stories (2003.) The Children’s Book (2009) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by A. S. Byatt
Pain hardens, and great pain hardens greatly, whatever the comforters say, and suffering does not ennoble, though it may occasionally lend a certain rigid dignity of manner to the suffering frame.
—A. S. Byatt
There are things that happen and leave no discernible trace, are not spoken of or written of, though it would be wrong to say that subsequent events go on indifferently, all the same, as though such things had never been.
—A. S. Byatt
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