A. S.

Byatt

Dame Antonia Susan Duffy DBE HonFBA (née Drabble; born 24 August 1936), known
professionally as A. S. Byatt, is an English novelist, poet and Booker Prize winner. In 2008, The Times
newspaper named her on its list of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.

The story of a young girl growing up in the shadow of a dominant father, Byatt's first novel, The
Shadow of the Sun, was published in 1964. Her novel The Game (1967) charts the dynamics between two
sisters, and the family theme is continued in her quartet The Virgin in the Garden (1978), Still Life (1985),
Babel Tower (1996), and A Whistling Woman (2002), Still Life winning the PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award
in 1989. Her quartet of novels is inspired by D. H. Lawrence, particularly The Rainbow and Women in Love.

Describing mid-20th-century Britain, the books follow the life of Frederica Potter, a young
intellectual studying at Cambridge at a time when women were heavily outnumbered by men at that
university, and then tracing her journey as a divorcée with a young son making a new life in London. Byatt
says some of the characters in her fiction represent her "greatest terror which is simple domesticity [...] I
had this image of coming out from under and seeing the light for a bit and then being shut in a kitchen,
which I think happened to women of my generation." Like Babel Tower, A Whistling Woman touches on
the utopian and revolutionary dreams of the 1960s. She describes herself as "a naturally pessimistic
animal": "I don't believe that human beings are basically good, so I think all utopian movements are
doomed to fail, but I am interested in them."

She has written critical studies of Dame Iris Murdoch, who was a friend, mentor and a significant
influence on her own writing. In those books and other works, Byatt alludes to, and builds upon, themes
from Romantic and Victorian literature. She conceives of fantasy as an alternative to, rather than an
escape from, everyday life, and it is often difficult to tell when the fantastic in her work actually represents
the eruption of psychosis. "In my work", she notes "writing is always so dangerous. It's very destructive.
People who write books are destroyers." Possession (1990) parallels the emerging relationship of two
contemporary academics with the past of two (fictional) nineteenth century poets whom they are
researching. It won the Booker Prize in 1990 and was made into a film in 2002. Byatt's novella Morpho
Eugenia, included in Angels & Insects (1992), was turned into the successful film with this same title
(1995), nominated for an Academy Award. Her novel The Children's Book was shortlisted for the 2009
Man Booker Prize and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

Also known for her short stories, Byatt has been influenced by Henry James and George Eliot as
well as Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, and Robert Browning, in merging realism and naturalism with fantasy.
Her story collections include Sugar and Other Stories (1987); The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye (1994), a
collection of fairy tales; Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice (1998); and Little Black Book of Stories (2003).
The Matisse Stories (1993) features three pieces, each describing a painting by Henri Matisse, each the
tale of an initially smaller crisis that shows the long-present unravelling in the protagonists' lives. Her
books reflect a continuous interest in zoology, entomology, geology, and Darwinism among other
repeated themes. Byatt has written for media including the British journal Prospect, The Guardian, The
Times and The Times Literary Supplement. She has been a judge on many literary award panels including
the Hawthornden Prize, the Booker, David Higham Prize for Fiction, and the Betty Trask Award.

On the role of writing in her life, she says: "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."

Ann Radcliffe

Ann Radcliffe (née Ward, 9 July 1764 – 7 February 1823) was an English author and pioneer of the
Gothic novel. Radcliffe's technique of explaining the supernatural elements of her novels has been
credited with enabling Gothic fiction to achieve respectability in the 1790s.

Radcliffe published five novels during her lifetime, which she always referred to as romances; a
final novel, Gaston de Blondeville was published posthumously in 1826. She also published a travel
narrative of her European travels, A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794, through Holland and the
Western Frontier of Germany, in 1795. At a time when the average amount earned by an author for a
manuscript was £10, her publishers, G. G. and J. Robinson, bought the copyright for The Mysteries of
Udolpho (1794) for £500, while Cadell and Davies paid £800 for The Italian (1797), making Radcliffe the
highest paid professional writer of the 1790s.

Jane Austen parodied The Mysteries of Udolpho in Northanger Abbey. Radcliffe did not like the
direction in which Gothic literature was heading – one of her later novels, The Italian, was written in
response to Matthew Gregory Lewis's The Monk. Contrary to the direction in which Gothic literature was
previously heading, Radcliffe began to portray her women characters as equal to male characters,
allowing them to dominate and overtake the typically powerful male dominant villains and heroes,
creating new roles for women in literature that were previously not available. It is assumed that this
frustration is what caused Radcliffe to cease writing. After Radcliffe's death, her husband released her
unfinished essay "On the Supernatural in Poetry", which details the difference between the sensation of
terror her works aimed to achieve and the horror Lewis sought to evoke. She states that terror aims to
stimulate readers through imagination and perceived evils while horror closes them off through fear and
physical dangers. "Terror and Horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul and awakens the
faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes and nearly annihilates them."

Radcliffe's fiction is marked by seemingly supernatural events that are then provided with rational
explanations. Some modern critics have been frustrated by her work, as she fails to include "real ghosts".
This could be motivated by the idea that works in the Romantic period, from the late 18th century to the
mid-19th century, had to undermine Enlightenment values such as rationalism and realism. Throughout
her work, traditional moral values are asserted, the rights of women are advocated, and reason prevails.

Alfred Tennyson

Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson, FRS (6 August 1809 – 6 October 1892) was Poet Laureate
of Great Britain and Ireland during much of Queen Victoria's reign and remains one of the most popular
British poets.

Tennyson excelled at penning short lyrics, such as "Break, Break, Break", "The Charge of the Light
Brigade", "Tears, Idle Tears", and "Crossing the Bar". Much of his verse was based on classical mythological
themes, such as Ulysses, although "In Memoriam A.H.H." was written to commemorate his friend Arthur
Hallam, a fellow poet and student at Trinity College, Cambridge, after he died of a stroke at the age of 22.
Tennyson also wrote some notable blank verse including Idylls of the King, "Ulysses", and "Tithonus".
During his career, Tennyson attempted drama, but his plays enjoyed little success. A number of phrases
from Tennyson's work have become commonplaces of the English language, including "Nature, red in
tooth and claw" (In Memoriam A.H.H.), "'Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at
all", "Theirs not to reason why, / Theirs but to do and die", "My strength is as the strength of ten, / Because
my heart is pure", "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield", "Knowledge comes, but Wisdom lingers",
and "The old order changeth, yielding place to new". He is the ninth most frequently quoted writer in The
Oxford Dictionary of Quotations.
 Alexander Pope

Alexander Pope (21 May 1688 – 30 May 1744) was an 18th-century English poet. He is best known
for his satirical verse, his translation of Homer and for his use of the heroic couplet. He is the second-most
frequently quoted writer in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations after Shakespeare.