Readers Place

A S Byatt interview/review

George Eliot’s reputation reached its height with the publication of Middlemarch , which is still widely recognised as her greatest work. It received extremely favourable contemporary reviews, with critics praising the realism of her characters and her descriptions of rural life. A few felt there was too much narrative interference from the author, however, arguing that this had a detrimental effect on plot and character development.

‘Middlemarch marks an epoch in the history of fiction in so far as its incidents are taken from the inner life…the material circumstances of the outer world are made subordinate and accessory to the artistic presentation of a definite passage of mental experience, but chiefly as giving a background of perfect realistic truth to a profoundly imaginative psychological study’ H. Lawrenny, writing in the Academy of 1 January 1873

‘[Eliot’s] reflections, if they somewhat injure the movements of the drama, are in themselves so beautiful that we should scarcely care to have them omitted’ Nation , 30 January 1873

‘As a didactic novel it has scarcely been equalled… no talent, no genius itself, can quite overcome the inherent defect of a conspicuous, constantly prominent lesson’ Saturday Review , 7 December 1872

‘One of the few English novels written for grown-up people’ Virginia Woolf

Possession , too, received immediate contemporary appreciation. Its ambitious scale and complex plotting were perhaps unfashionable for the period, but its brilliance shone through and was recognised by the 1990 Booker Prize judges.

‘A. S. Byatt is the most consciously intellectual woman writer since George Eliot, but her erudition is equalled by her understanding of human passions…This novel is a triumphant success on every level – as a critique of Victorian poetry, an unbearably moving love story and a satire on the modern “Biography Industry”’ Cosmopolitan

‘Byatt has contrived a masterly ending to a fine work; intelligent, ingenious and humane, Possession bids fair to be looked back upon as one of the most memorable novels of the 1990s’ Times Literary Supplement

‘Possession is inordinate, but not indiscriminate; it is unfashionable; it is generous, teeming with more ideas than a year’s worth of ordinary novels’ Spectator

AUTHOR INTERVIEWS

George Eliot

No sooner does a woman show that she has genius or effective talent, than she receives the tribute of being moderately praised and severely criticised. By a peculiar thermometric adjustment, when a woman’s talent is at zero, journalistic approbation is at the boiling pitch; when she attains mediocrity, it is already at no more than summer heat; and if ever she reaches excellence, critical enthusiasm drops to the freezing point.

Harriet Martineau, Currer Bell, and Mrs. Gaskell have been treated as cavalierly as if they had been men… The standing apology for women who become writers without any special qualification is, that society shuts them out from other spheres of occupation. Society is a very culpable entity, and has to answer for the manufacture of many unwholesome commodities, from bad pickles to bad poetry.

But society, like ‘matter’, and Her Majesty’s Government, and other lofty abstractions has its share of excessive blame as well as excessive praise. Where there is one woman who writes from necessity, we believe that there are three women who write from vanity; and, besides, there is something so antiseptic in the mere healthy fact of working for one’s bread, that the most trashy and rotten kind of feminine literature is not likely to have been produced under such circumstances.

‘In all labour there is profit;’ but ladies’ silly novels, we imagine, are less the result of labour than of busy idleness. Happily, we are not dependent on argument to prove that Fiction is a department of literature in which women can, after their kind, fully equal men.

A cluster of great names, both living and dead, rush to our memories in evidence that women can produce novels not only fine, but among the very finest; – novels, too, that have a precious speciality, lying quite apart from masculine aptitudes and experience. No educational restrictions can shut women out from the materials of fiction, and there is no species of art which is so free from rigid requirements. Like crystalline masses, it may take any form, and yet be beautiful; we have only to pour in the right elements – genuine observation, humour and passion…

Taken from the essay ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’ by George Eliot, published in the Westminster Review , 66 (October 1856): 442– 61

A. S. Byatt

1. Can I ask you about the ‘Postscript’ [to Possession ]…why you put it in?

I got into more and more of a panic as I approached the end because it became clear to me that, as the story began with Roland, so it ought actually to end with Ash – not with Roland. And I wanted the past to be more alive in the present than the present. That was one thing. And another was, I knew I had cheated my hero, which was Randolph Henry Ash, because he was a good man and a clever man, and had he not really gone on looking until he found out whether he had a child or not, he wouldn’t have actually been the man I invented.

If I had made a plot which allowed him simply to accept either that Christabel had killed the child, which clearly she had not – and when he thought about it when he went home, he would know she hadn’t – or that it was impossible for him to find the child, it wouldn’t have worked. So, I thought, ‘I will put this in.’ And I am always seduced by putting Paradise Lost into the end of anything – so I put him into a summer garden where all the flowers were improbably flowering at the same time, whereas they would have in fact flowered sequentially.

There are three or four places in Possession where the narrator talks to the reader, and tells the reader things, the most important things, which the modern people in the novel never find out.

The narrator tells the reader what Ellen Ash feels. The narrator tells the reader what happened in the Postscript. Nobody in the modern time knows that. And I think this is partly me saying ‘Look…with scholarship, you think you will get to the end of the quest and find out what this person was really like, and what they really felt, and actually the chances are that the most important moment of their life, or most important moments, are forever hidden.’

So it was partly a theoretical matter of principle to tell people things that couldn’t be found out by scholars. In that sense I was also saying a novel is better than a biography, or that a novel does things a biography can’t do.

Taken from Jonathan Noakes’ interview with A. S. Byatt, 2 April 2003, in A. S. Byatt: The Essential Guide, pp. 19 – 20