Featured Reading Guide
A S Byatt
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A. S. Byatt is internationally acclaimed as a novelist, short story writer and critic. Her most recent novel, outside this tetralogy, is The Biographer’s Tale. Educated at York and Newnham College, Cambridge, she taught at the Central School of Art and Design, and was Senior lecturer in English at University College, London, before becoming a full-time writer in 1983. She was appointed CBE in 1990 and DBE in 1999.
topAbout the Book
topA S Byatt interview/review
salon – 7 February 2002
“There have always been great women writing the English novel since it began, and it is different in that way from most other cultures’ novels. But it makes peculiar problems for literary feminism in England, because people keep saying you have to prove yourself, and actually the novelists were there. It began with Jane Austen, there was George Eliot, there were the Bröntes. I grew up with Iris Murdoch, Doris Lessing, Muriel Spark, who were already working and were already successful.”
“I think what the father in Possession stood for was the fear of the goodness of good literature, this terror of the great past. Though I left it open as to how good a novelist the father was, I think he did represent the terror of everything that has been done when you’re just starting, and the feeling, when you’re a woman, that you start with one hand tied behind your back, despite George Eliot and the Bröntes and Iris Murdoch.”
“I think on some other level it’s a novel about a kind of battle between D.H. Lawrence and (the famous literary critic) F.R. Leavis, about a battle between criticism and actually wanting to write. Because if you’ve come out of the university with an English degree, the desire to write, at least in my country, is quite heavily knocked out of you. You have become timid and afraid and overwrought, and also told constantly that it isn’t your business. I had a supervisor of a Ph.D. I was doing in Oxford, and she said, ‘My dear, every young girl with a first class degree expects to be able to write a good novel. None of them can.’”
topStarting Points for Discussion
- What does the concept of ‘possession’ mean to the novel’s various characters, both modern and Victorian?
- The scholars in the novel see R. H. Ash as a specifically masculine type of poet and LaMotte as specifically feminine. Do you feel that such a classification is valid? What is there about Ash’s and LaMotte’s diction and subject matter that fulfils our ideas of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’?
- What is the fine line, if any, between a ghoulish intrusion upon the privacy of the dead, and the legitimate claims of scholarship and history?
- Freedom and autonomy are highly valued by both Christabel and Maud. What does autonomy mean to each of these characters and to what extent does the time they live in influence their expectations?
- However much the scholars have discovered, at least two secrets have been kept from them at the end and are revealed only to the reader. What are these secrets, and what effect do they have on the understanding of the reader?
- Why does Byatt use poetry to give away so many clues to the story? Are the poems a necessary and integral part of the novel?
Other Books by A S Byatt
A Whistling Woman
While Frederica – the spirited heroine of The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life…
Angels And Insects
Morpho Eugenia and The Conjugial Angel are two fascinating novellas and like…
Babel Tower
Babel Tower is the third novel in Byatt’s highly acclaimed Frederica quartet…
Degrees Of Freedom: The Early…
First published in 1965, A.S. Byatt’s Degrees of Freedom examined the first…
Elementals
A volume of stories from A. S. Byatt is always a joy, and this one is rich and…
Memory
‘You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realise…
Suggested Further Reading
- The Name of the Rose ~ Umberto Eco
- Black Sheep ~ Georgette Heyer
- The French Lieutenant’s Woman ~ John Fowles
- The Black Prince ~ Iris Murdoch
- Tennyson ~ Christopher Ricks
- Selected Poems: Robert Browning ~ Daniel Karlin