She did not like being called by her full first name, Antonia Susan, preferring the simple initials which appear on the covers of all her books: AS Byatt, who died in London on November 16 at the age of 87, was a full woman humorous but reserved, whose intelligence and talent were never lost in highlighting his own person.
Ennobled in the order of the British Empire, this novelist, essayist, poet, literary critic and fervent European had nevertheless received, in her country, all the honors that a writer could hope for. Winner of the Booker Prize in 1990 for her novel Possession (Flammarion, 1993), Dame Antonia Byatt was translated into more than thirty languages and enjoyed, especially within the English-speaking world, an exceptional reputation.
Originally, however, the woman who was born Antonia Susan Drabble in Sheffield (Yorkshire) in 1936, initially lived, literary speaking, in the shadow of her younger sister Margaret Drabble. Both graduated from prestigious establishments, Oxford for one and Cambridge for the second, the sisters each wrote independently, but in different styles and following their own trajectories. Margaret Drabble enjoyed early success in the early 1960s, while her elder, then a teacher of art history, remained more confidential.
“Showing up”, the path to success
At the same time and for several decades, the two women maintained a sort of latent competition which Antonia Byatt sometimes spoke of, suggesting that the origins of this conflict, entirely filtered by their texts, went back to childhood. Certain scenes depicted by her sister hurt her because she glimpsed, behind the characters or even the objects described, a sort of “pattern in the carpet », to use the title of Henry James’s famous short story: implicit allusions to their shared past, the scope of which only she was capable of perceiving – and sometimes, she claimed, the aggressiveness.
Is it to gain the upper hand in this underground fight? About Possessionthe sparkling Victorian novel pastiche that propelled her to the forefront of the literary scene, AS Byatt once explained that it was the only book written by her “to be loved » and that she had chosen this strategy in order to ” to show oneself ” – in other words, to make your work known. In an interview cited by the Times, she says that she had deliberately paced her story “keeping in mind the reader’s attention span. » The result lived up to his expectations, perhaps even surpassed them.
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