Dame A. S. Byatt

For many years A.S. Byatt was known primarily as an academic. It is not surprising, therefore, that her complex and ambitious fictional works are intellectual and very literary, in both style and content.

Many of Byatt's characters are writers or academics undertaking various projects - which are often a central part of the story - and the self-conscious narratives frequently draw attention to the process of literary and artistic creation, particularly the gap between experience and the language and images that are used to represent experience.

The novels and stories are rife with intertextuality and literary allusions and references: to the discourse of fairytales and fantasy literature, to literary and linguistic theories, and to literary history, most notably the Victorian era, of which Byatt has extensive knowledge. Her fascination for the nineteenth century also extends to its scientific and religious debates, and some of her fiction explores her interest in Darwinism. Along with all this, Byatt is also a masterful storyteller, creating fascinating, complex characters and compelling plots that combine social realism with literariness and symbolism.

Byatt's first two novels, Shadow of a Sun (1964) and The Game (1967), did not make a significant impact but they did introduce the theme of complex family relationships that pervades her later fiction: the first novel centres on a daughter's attempts to escape the dominating influence of her father, while the second features the fraught relationship between two sisters. These novels also 'reveal a development towards the fusion of realism and symbolism in her ... [subsequent] work. Shadow of a Sun ... is essentially a straightforward piece of orthodox realism, whereas The Game makes extensive use of mythical and symbolic elements within a realist framework' (Peter Lewis, Contemporary Novelists, ed. Henderson, 1991). Byatt first began to attain recognition as a novelist with The Virgin in the Garden (1978), the first in a quartet which includes Still Life (1985), Babel Tower (1996) and A Whistling Woman (2002). The quartet is vast in scope, utilising the story of a Yorkshire family to explore issues of art, literature, religion, science and social change during the second Elizabethan era, beginning with the accession of Elizabeth II in the early 1950s and going on to explore the social revolution of the 1960s. The focus is on the three children of public schoolmaster Bill Potter: Stephanie, an English teacher who shocks her agnostic father by marrying a curate; Frederica, a brilliant intellectual who falls in love with Alexander, a writer and teacher; and Marcus, an emotionally troubled boy who is led astray by his mentally unstable science teacher.Byatt's fiction often explores changing female experience throughout the twentieth century, and she has commented that her 'greatest terror' is 'simple domesticity' (Sam Leith, The Guardian, 25 April 2009). In the quartet, Stephanie and Frederica both attend Cambridge University at a time when female students were rare. Stephanie goes on to become a traditional housewife who, though relatively happy, misses her former intellectual life (later dying in a tragic accident), while Frederica's marriage ends in divorce and a new life as a strong and self-sufficient single mother. These elements of social realism are intertwined with literary and artistic allusions and references:  The Virgin in the Garden centres on Alexander's play about Elizabeth I (the performance of which coincides with the coronation of Elizabeth II), and Still Life explores representations of reality in art and literature, with a particular focus on the work of Vincent Van Gogh. There is also a wealth of intellectual and philosophical thought: Babel Tower examines linguistic theories through Alexander's study of different teaching methods, while A Whistling Woman incorporates complex debates about the nature of the mind, body and spirit.In the middle of writing her quartet, Byatt wrote another novel, Possession (1990), which turned out to be her most successful. It not only won the Booker Prize for Fiction and high critical acclaim, but was also a great commercial success, marking the beginning of Byatt's wider appeal to the general reading public as well as the literary world. Possession is another ambitious novel, a spectacular intertextual literary web which combines explorations of Victorian literature and culture with a gripping detective story and love story. The ingenious plot enables Byatt to intertwine two stories of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries respectively: contemporary academics Roland Michell and Maud Bailey are researching two fictional Victorian poets, Ralph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte. As Michell and Bailey begin to uncover evidence of a previously unknown love affair between Ash and LaMotte, the historical story parallels their own developing relationship. This seemingly traditional love story is combined with fascinating layers of information about Victorian culture, including Darwinism and spiritualism, as well as many different narrative forms: Byatt includes the letters, diaries and other documents that form part of the research, as well as Ash's and LaMotte's poems and fairytales.Byatt continues to write about the nineteenth century in Angels and Insects (1992), which features two novellas, and The Biographer's Tale (2000), a complex and labyrinthine novel which, through the story of another young academic, compares and contrasts the abstract nature of intellectual theories with the supposedly real and factual process of writing biographies, suggesting that 'factual reality' is not as straightforward as one might think, for perhaps everything is merely a complex interplay of subjective stories and ideas. Byatt's next novel, The Children's Book (2009), has almost equalled the success of Possession. The novel spans from the 1890s until the end of World War I, and again the literary and intellectual themes are strong: Olive Wellwood, a children's writer who is inspired partly by Edith Nesbit, and her husband Humphrey are liberal-minded Fabians who live with their children in a large, sprawling country house, an unconventional home which opens its doors to a multitude of people. While the Wellwood children appear to have an idyllic life, their existence is revealed to be far from happy as the hypocrisy of the adults is exposed: beneath the facade of liberalism, utopian politics and Olive's much-loved children's stories lies a dark side - an unhappy family with layers of sinister and scandalous secrets. The compelling story of the Wellwood family is intertwined with the social and political context of the world in which they live: Edwardian Britain is entering a new era in which the established social order is changing, the suffragette movement is gaining full force and World War I is approaching. And, as always in Byatt's fiction, embedded within the realist elements are layers of literary allusion, hinting at the dark side of both fairytales and utopian visions: 'The Children's Book is on one level a work of careful social and psychological realism ... On another level, it is stuffed with the motifs of fairy stories: doubles, changelings, locked rooms, underground journeys, boys who refuse to grow up' (Sam Leith, The Guardian, 25 April 2009).Elizabeth O'Reilly 2012.

'I write novels because I am passionately interested in language. Novels are works of art which are made out of language, and are made in solitude by one person and read in solitude by one person - by many different, single people, it is to be hoped. So I am also interested in what goes on in the minds of readers, and writers, and characters and narrators in books. I like to write about people who think, to whom thinking is as important and exciting (and painful) as sex or eating. This doesn't mean I want my books to be cerebral or simply battles of ideas. I love formal patterning in novels - I like to discover and make connections between all sorts of different people, things, ways of looking, points in time and space. But I also like the idea that novels can be, as James said, 'loose baggy monsters', a generous form that can take account of almost anything. Temperamentally, and morally, I like novels with large numbers of people and centres of consciousness, not novels that adopt a narrow single point-of-view, author's or character's. I don't like novels that preach or proselytise. (I fear people with very violent beliefs, though I admire people with thought-out principles.) The novel is an agnostic form - it explores and describes; the novelist and the reader learn more about the world along the length of the book.'