Introduction to A.S. Byatt
By Gordon Hirsch, Professor of English
It is difficult to generalize about A. S. Byatt’s writing. As is true for many a fine writer, nearly every work she produces is a foray into new territory. In her writings one finds excursions into poetry and science, texts that are something like fairy stories or folk tales, texts that are something like historical novels, and highly self-conscious post-modern fictions. To cite one example of Byatt’s ability to startle her readers, the story “A Stone Woman,” published in the New Yorker last October, describes the gradual, literal petrifaction of the title character, turning to stone, a plot one might not anticipate from the author of Possession.
This evening, however, I want to focus on the way many of her books appeal to what Minnesota’s own Garrison Keillor would call, I’m sure broadly and inclusively, English majors—Byatt’s appeal to all kinds of students of English and readers of literature, from the professor and graduate student to the nonacademic, avid reader. I say this fully aware that Byatt can also be a devastating satirist of academics—a critic of the various ways professionals read, use, and abuse literature. What one inevitably finds in her works, however, is a consciousness of history, and of the traditions of literature—a sense of the importance of the past and of the literature of previous decades and epochs. Her works are often about what we might learn about our present lives if we read the past, construct the past, interact with the past. Some of her characters have even fallen in love over the past!
Byatt’s fiction has looked back at a variety of times, but I think most deeply and affectionately at the nineteenth century—in such works as Possession, the two novellas in Angels & Insects, and, to some extent, The Biographer’s Tale. You will understand that, as a student of Victorian literature myself, I am entirely without bias in making this assertion. As a writer of serious historical fiction, Byatt celebrates the past, at the same time that she makes us aware of how uncertain our knowledge of any particular historical moment is. Many of you will recall the mysteries that must be unraveled by the literary scholar-detectives in Possession. Similarly, in The Biographer’s Tale, the biographer’s biographer is led to a fairly random collection of index cards, scribbled notes on various potential biographical subjects. That’s history, she seems to be saying.
As I discovered chatting recently with some of my colleagues, many readers of Byatt’s fiction may not, in fact, be aware of her academic background and scholarly writing. Born in Sheffield, A. S. Byatt spent her undergraduate years at Cambridge surrounded by “the arduously moral climate” of the authoritative critic of the time, F. R. Leavis. While she has marked her distance from Leavis and that time, I don’t believe she has ever rejected the idea of the centrality of literary traditions to education, which we associate with M. Arnold, T. S. Eliot, and F. R. Leavis. She pursued post-graduate studies at Bryn Mawr College, and then studied Renaissance Literature at Oxford. She left graduate school to become a writer primarily of fiction, for as she put it, “greedy reading made me want to write.” Even so, she taught literature for a decade at University College, London, and wrote critical books on Iris Murdoch, as well as on Wordsworth and Coleridge. She has also published collections of informed and informative critical essays, including “Passions of the Mind” and “On Histories and Stories.” Though these collections range over authors as varied as Robert Browning, Norman Mailer, and Toni Morrison, other readers may perhaps feel as I do that her deepest affections and affinities lie with the greatest of the nineteenth century women novelists, George Eliot, who is remembered for her keen eye for precise novelistic detail, for her steely and skeptical intelligence, for her intellectual engagement with science and the issues of her time, and for the passions of her mind.
Please welcome A. S. Byatt
April 17, 2004
Ted Mann Concert Hall