"Coherence and closure are deep human desires that are presently unfashionable. But they are always both frightening and enchantingly desirable."
"Since riddles are the order of our day
Come here, my love, and I will tell thee one."
--A. S. Byatt, Possession
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| Mrs. Dalloway | | The Hours | | The French Lieutenant's Woman | | Possession | | Talking It Over | | Success |
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A.S. Byatt (1936- )
Biography A. S. Byatt was born Antonia Susan Drabble on August 24, 1936, in Sheffield, England. She earned a BA at Cambridge University in 1957, then was a graduate student at Bryn Mawr College, in the Pennsylvania, for one year (1957-8), and at Oxford for a second (1958-9), before marrying Ian Charles Rayner Byatt in 1959; they were divorced in 1969 and she married Peter John Duffy later that year. Byatt began teaching in London in the 1960s, becoming a regular faculty member in the English department at University College, London, in 1972, and leaving there as a senior lecturer in 1983 to pursue a full-time writing career. In addition to her six novels and four volumes of shorter fictions, Byatt has published a wide range of essays, criticism, interviews, and other writings. She has contributed prefaces to editions of women writers such as Elizabeth Bowen, Grace Paley, and Willa Cather, and she has also edited several classic Victorian texts, such as George Eliot's Mill on the Floss and Robert Browning's Dramatic Monologues; the latter--of particular interest, perhaps, for the study of Possession--appeared, not coincidentally, in 1990. Byatt became a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1983. In 1985, she received the Silver Pen Award for her novel Still Life, and in 1990 Possession won the Booker Prize, Britain's highest literary award.
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