She was not notably popular with her colleagues at UCL, some of whom formed a drinking society named “Programme for the Swift Eradication of the Unspeakable Duffy”: the initials were significant. She gave up teaching with relief in 1983, to write, and engage in concomitant activities; she was chairman of the Society of Authors from 1986 to 1988, and served on the Kingman Committee on English teaching in schools. Byatt's relationship with her sister Margaret Drabble was sometimes strained due to the presence of autobiographical elements in both their writing. While their relationship was no longer especially close and they did not read each other's books, Drabble described the situation as "normal sibling rivalry" [16] and Byatt said it had been "terribly overstated by gossip columnists" and that the sisters "always have liked each other on the bottom line." [17] Byatt was an agnostic, though she maintained an affinity for Quaker services. [10] [15] She enjoyed watching snooker, tennis, and football. [15] [18] I have to admit, I did not approach this book this time around with what I would consider pure motives. I wasn’t in it to find things I had never found before, to revisit a personal classic to explore ideas that I had left behind for the time when I was ready to connect with them in the way that they deserved. I wasn’t even in it to re-approach situations and characters with a new perspective of age and experience. Byatt said in 2009: "I think of writing simply in terms of pleasure. It's the most important thing in my life, making things. Much as I love my husband and my children, I love them only because I am the person who makes these things. I, who I am, is the person that has the project of making a thing. Well, that's putting it pompously—but constructing. I do see it in sort of three-dimensional structures. And because that person does that all the time, that person is able to love all these people." [7] Her preference for "making things" is also present in a 2003 interview, when she said: "I don't like to talk about creative writing, which is a vestigial religious tic in me. If anything is created, God does it. I don't. I make things—making is a nice word". [10]

In the real world...there was little real connection between them. Maud was a beautiful woman such as [Roland] had no claim to possess. She had a secure job and an international reputation.' Zoë Waldie, her literary agent at RCW, added: “Antonia used to say that making things out of language was the most exciting thing she knew. She did this magnificently over many decades and held readers spellbound. Her formidable erudition and passion for language were combined with a love of scholarship and an astonishing memory, forged by learning poetry and rules for spelling and grammar by heart as a child. Her writing is multi-layered, endlessly varied and deeply intellectual, threaded through with myths and metaphysics. She adored George Eliot and Proust, also Terry Pratchett. She was interested in so many things; phone calls with her about work were never routine, nor brief, and would reliably and joyfully digress to the topic of a painter or new exhibition, or to a European writer she’d just discovered, or to how the brain works, or to the tennis on television, or travel... She was a committed Europhile and relished getting to know her many foreign publishers and translators, on the continent and beyond. She was avidly interested in new writing and delighted in championing upcoming authors. We are heartbroken to have lost her, and our thoughts are with her family.”Listen to an interview with A. S. Byatt given to Fresh Air on WHYY-FM, 21 November 1991 (following publication of Possession; c. 15 minutes) [23] There are things that happen and leave no discernible trace, are not spoken of or written of, though it would be wrong to say that subsequent events go on indifferently, all the same, as though such things had never been.'

Kingman Committee of Inquiry into the teaching of English Language, (Department of Education and Science) [6]a b Brace, Marianne (9 June 1996). "That thinking feeling". The Observer. She never quite relaxes, although we dip into subjects as varied as her grandchildren and how 'one should feed small children delightful words' to her unexpected admiration for Georgette Heyer's 'deeply moving' romantic novels. In 1987 she published Sugar and Other Stories, her first short story collection: elegiac in tone, it dealt with loss and hope and possibility, and people’s attempts to achieve, in however small a way, a sense of personal harmony and equilibrium.

Robert Macfarlane noted in The Observer that the Quartet was marred by “excessive use of symbols (spiders, spirals, fire, webs, mirrors), a narrative gnarliness, an overbearing sense of allegory”, and spoke for many critics when he complained of “the ludicrous names of almost all the characters… and the not infrequent stylistic botches. At one point, for instance, two dogs come into a room ‘agitating their sterns’, which I presume is a ghastly attempt to say ‘wagging their tails’ without, for some reason, saying so.” If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month.

Sign Up to the Newsletter

Guardian book club: Possession by AS Byatt". The Guardian 19 June 2009. 19 June 2009 . Retrieved 19 October 2014. A. S. Byatt (24 August 1936 – 16 November 2023). A statement from Chatto & Windus, Vintage Books, UK". Penguin. 17 November 2023. Sheffield High School; The Mount School, York; Newnham College, Cambridge (BA Hons; Hon. Fellow 1999); Bryn Mawr College, Philadelphia, USA; Somerville College, Oxford. For license compliance, any content used from the original article must be properly attributed; if you use content from the original, please leave a note at the top of your rewrite saying as much. You may duplicate non-infringing text that you had contributed yourself.