At 20, Antonia Susan Byatt was not yet sure she could write. Yet her determination was already evident. On her 20th birthday, she wrote: “Today, I know I can do anything.
But not yet.” These intimate reflections can be found among the material in a major new archive of Byatt’s work, acquired by the British Library. It offers an insight into the development of the Booker prize-winning writer, who died aged 87 in 2023, and whose intricate, intellectually ambitious fiction earned her international acclaim. The collection comprises 68 boxes of working notebooks, manuscripts, correspondence, personal diaries and documents from Byatt’s 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’s Book, which was shortlisted for the Booker prize in 2009. According to the British Library’s curators, it is one of the most significant contemporary literary acquisitions the library has made in recent years. And then when you actually look behind it, there are hundreds, thousands of little threads.” 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.
The documents “reveal the way her mind works”, Uglow says. She’ll say things like: ‘This is fascinating, but it doesn’t fit. I can’t go on, this is not working out.’ “She got very cross if she was interrupted, or had to travel or wasn’t feeling well,” Uglow adds.
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. She would really think it through, so when you get to the manuscript there aren’t many corrections.” Byatt continued to write by hand well into the 2000s and 2010s.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
