died aged 87<\/a> in 2023, and whose intricate, intellectually ambitious fiction earned her international acclaim.<\/p>\n\u2018The other side of the tapestry\u2019 \u2026 a draft of Possession. Photograph: Copyright Antonia Susan Duffy Literary Trust\/courtesy of the British Library<\/p>\n
The collection comprises 68 boxes of working notebooks, manuscripts, correspondence, personal diaries and documents from Byatt\u2019s early life. It includes handwritten drafts of Possession, which won the 1990 Booker prize, and material relating to her 1978 novel The Virgin in the Garden and The Children\u2019s Book, which was shortlisted for the Booker prize in 2009. According to the British Library\u2019s curators, it is one of the most significant contemporary literary acquisitions the library has made in recent years.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s the other side of the tapestry,\u201d says Jenny Uglow, Byatt\u2019s editor, who worked closely with her on Possession. \u201cIn her books, you have these extremely elaborate plots, very complicated characters with their extraordinary names. And then when you actually look behind it, there are hundreds, thousands of little threads.\u201d<\/p>\n
Born in Sheffield in 1936, Byatt studied English at Cambridge before continuing her education at Bryn Mawr College, Philadelphia, and at Oxford. She spent more than two decades teaching in universities and art schools, before leaving academia in 1983 to write full-time. She was known for her voracious research and her ability to weave apparently disparate fields of knowledge into her fiction. The archive allows researchers to follow Byatt as she assembles the raw material of her fiction, tests ideas and repeatedly questions whether they will work.<\/p>\n
The documents \u201creveal the way her mind works\u201d, Uglow says. \u201cShe thought extremely fast and she had one of those racing minds, almost like a three o\u2019clock in the morning mind, everything whirling around. She\u2019ll say things like: \u2018This is fascinating, but it doesn\u2019t fit. I can\u2019t go on, this is not working out.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u201cShe got very cross if she was interrupted, or had to travel or wasn\u2019t feeling well,\u201d Uglow adds. \u201cI think what the archive does is allow you to follow an extremely distinctive writer in the way that they create their work.\u201d<\/p>\n
The handwritten drafts of Possession are particularly illuminating. The novel, which interweaves the story of two contemporary academics investigating the lives of fictional Victorian poets, is a feat of elaborate plotting. The hundreds of pages of notebooks drafting the book show Byatt diligently working through questions of chronology and the relationships between the characters before the narrative took its final shape.<\/p>\n
\u201cOnce she had decided on a book, it would take two, three or four years [to write it],\u201d Uglow says. \u201cShe worked everything out scene by scene before she wrote the scene itself. She would really think it through, so when you get to the manuscript there aren\u2019t many corrections.\u201d<\/p>\n
AS Byatt\u2019s school report card \u2013 with a distinction in English literature. Photograph: the British Library<\/p>\n
Byatt continued to write by hand well into the 2000s and 2010s. \u201cIt\u2019s rather like craft work,\u201d Uglow says. \u201cThere\u2019s a connection between the brain, the imagination and the hand.\u201d<\/p>\n
The diaries show that Byatt\u2019s intellectual confidence coexisted with flecks of self-doubt. At a young age, she described herself as an \u201cintellectually slow developer\u201d and wondered whether she had a \u201csecond rate mind\u201d.<\/p>\n
In another entry, she wondered whether her abstract way of thinking would prevent her from creating convincing characters \u2013 \u201ccharacters with blood in them\u201d.<\/p>\n
The collection also contains correspondence with other writers, including the novelist Iris Murdoch, with whom Byatt had a friendly relationship, and letters documenting her exchanges with younger writers.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf she saw a promising young writer, she was excited,\u201d Uglow says. \u201cShe took great pleasure in seeing their books come out, and was loyal to them.\u201d<\/p>\n
The papers also capture Byatt\u2019s wry observations of the people she encountered. During her time in the United States as a young woman, she offered a tart assessment of the women around her. \u201cAmerican women \u2013 curiously, stuntedly efficient & childlike,\u201d she wrote. \u201cMost of these are 26, 27 \u2013 one would imagine them less. Friendly though, and not unintelligent.\u201d<\/p>\n
The library estimates that cataloguing the 68 boxes will take up to two years. Once complete, the archive will sit alongside its holdings of the literary papers of writers including Angela Carter, Beryl Bainbridge, Hanif Kureishi and Graham Swift.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe British Library is thrilled to have acquired the archive of AS Byatt<\/a>,\u201d says Helen Melody, the library\u2019s lead curator of contemporary literary and creative archives. \u201cByatt sits at the heart of the British literary establishment and her prominence within postwar British literature cannot be overstated. This collection will be a hugely significant resource for researchers seeking to learn more about her life and work.\u201d<\/p>\nUglow thinks Byatt would have welcomed the acquisition. \u201cI think she would be very happy to see her work taken seriously,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd she would have enjoyed the fact that people wanted to see it and that it was being looked after so carefully.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At 20, Antonia Susan Byatt was not yet sure she could write. \u201cDo I take myself seriously as…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":649083,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[146,85,46],"class_list":["post-649082","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/649082","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=649082"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/649082\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/649083"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=649082"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=649082"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=649082"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}