AS Byatt: post scriptum (En)

The death of AS Byatt has really affected me, and I am still processing it. Need to read (and re-read) her books and essays.

Also, come across a brilliant tribute to her in the DT—the most amazing woman, she was stubborn, lonely, struck by a great tragedy, incredibly smart, not a people’s pleaser and of a distinctive talent. In other words, a true hero in a literary world.

The writer DJ Taylor, commenting on photographs of Antonia Byatt during this period, described her as “a striking young woman, halfway between a Morley College bluestocking of the Victorian era and Vanessa Redgrave in Antonioni’s Blow-Up”. She was divorced in 1969 and in the same year married Peter Duffy, with whom she had two more daughters.

In 1972 her son Charles, aged 11, was struck and killed by a drink-driver. Antonia Duffy had been reluctantly planning to take up a lectureship at University College, London, to help pay for Charles’s school fees; she was so devastated that she gave up writing and reviewing, and could think of no alternative but to take the job.

She was intellectually paralysed by grief, until, as she recalled, “I remember once sort of sitting down and thinking, ‘I am terribly depressed and this can not go on…’ and then I thought, ‘Well, you can do two things. You can kill yourself or you can get interested in absolutely everything.’ ” The result was the polymathic intellectualism of the early volumes in The Frederica Quartet.

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.

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.”

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Unsentimental, uncompromisingly intelligent and with limited capacity for making or enjoying jokes, she was formidable to meet, but extremely generous in the help she gave to young writers. ©