Antonia Susan Duffy, the writer who signed her novels as AS Byatt and gave them an intellectual charge that kept the general public away from her work for years—until the international success of Possessionin 1990—has died at the age of 87, as reported this Friday by his publisher Chatto & Windus.
During the first half of her literary career, which spanned five decades, her books were minority works, lacking what she herself called “narrative greed or gluttony,” the reader’s anxiety to advance the plot. Her success came when, inspired by that sales phenomenon that she was The name of the rose by the Italian Umberto Eco, AS Byatt dared to play with metafiction and the detective plot in Possession, the novel that launched him to stardom. The parallel story of two romances, that of two poets of the Victorian era invented by the author, who wrote long letters and poems attributed to their characters, and two academics of the present time who investigate and trace that relationship, obtained recognition and the unanimous admiration of critics. In 1990, AS Byatt obtained the Booker Prizethe most prestigious British literature award, for that book.
Another even better one would come for many of his followers, in 2009: The Children’s Book (The Children’s Book), which, under the excuse of the complex internal relationships of two families, that of a children’s writer and that of a ceramist, between the end of the 19th century and the end of the First World War, explores the changes in the social customs and all the political ideas—socialists, anarchists, Marxists, suffragettes…—of a deeply turbulent era in Europe. She is also the author of the text Angels and insects which was adapted to film in 1995 with Kristin Scott Thomas and Patsy Kensit in the lead roles. The one of Possessionwith Gwyneth Paltrow at the helm, arrived in 2002. And the Three thousand years waiting for youwith Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba, did so in 2022.
Her birth name, in 1936, was Antonia Drabble. She 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 prestigious economist from whom she would take his surname for her stage name, with whom she had two children. Ten years later she would divorce, remarry Peter Duffy and have two more daughters.
Until 1983, when sales of his books began to take off and he gained greater financial independence, he taught literature at the University College of London. AS Byatt was, in addition to being a writer, a great literary critic capable of enlightening and enlivening any debate with her firm and controversial opinions. From the writer Martin Amis, the enfant terrible of British literature of the late 20th and early 21st centuries with which he shared a publisher, he even said that he was a “male peacock,” after he requested an advance that he was unlikely to achieve with his future sales. “I don’t see why I should subsidize his greed, simply because he has to pay for a divorce and wants to fix half his teeth,” he once said of the writer. Regarding the great publishing success of recent decades, the saga of the boy wizard Harry Potter written by author JK Rowling, she said that it was an unoriginal and less ambitious work.
In 1972 his son Charles, 11 years old, was killed by a drunk driver. Paralyzed by her sadness, as she herself said, she said to herself: “I can do two things. “Commit suicide, or become interested in absolutely everything that surrounds me.” Behind this universal intellectual ambition is the impulse of the four novels that make up Federica’s quartetwhich started with The Virgin in the Garden, and accompanies for hundreds of pages a Cambridge-educated woman who elbows her way through a world dominated by men, during the 1950s and 1960s. Each of the political or intellectual ideas that emerged during that period History appears 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 replied that her work was a response to the solipsism—me, me, me, and only me—that she believed other authors of her time reflected. She preferred that her characters explore the world of art, philosophy or politics.
What AS Byatt never took well was the constant comparison that the British press made between her and her sister, Margaret Drabble, who achieved success as a writer, during her time, more quickly and widely than Antonia. They came to describe them and their stormy relationship as the Olivia de Havilland and Joan Fontaine of the world of literature, in memory of the long rivalry of the two famous actress sisters.
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 plus 10 doctorates honoris causa from both universities, he divided his time between his home in Putney (England) and the town of The Cevennes, in the south of France. A BBC documentary recorded his summer stay in the villa, where he constantly dedicated himself to writing and reading. Her husband was forbidden to go there. On several occasions, she AS Byatt acknowledged that she liked books more than people.
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