A.S. Byatt and the Heliotropic Imagination

A.S. Byatt’s novel Possession: A Romance attracted international acclaim in 1990, winning both the Booker Prize and the Irish Times/Aer Lingus International Fiction Prize. In her long and eminent career, Byatt has steadily published both fiction and non-fiction, the latest of which has not, until now, been given full critical consideration.

Enter Jane Campbell’s new book, A.S. Byatt and the Heliotropic Imagination, a comprehensive critical reading of Byatt’s fiction from The Shadow of the Sun and The Game, published in the 1960s, to A Whistling Woman (2002).

The book begins with an overview of Byatt’s writing and, drawing on her interviews and essays, sets forth the critical principles that inform the novelist’s work. Following this introduction, a chronologically structured account of the novels and short stories traces Byatt’s literary development.

As well as exploring the ways in which Byatt has successfully negotiated a path between twentieth-century realism and postmodern experiment, Campbell employs a critical perspective appropriate to the author’s individualistic feminist stance, stressing the breadth of Byatt’s intellectual concerns and her insistence on placing her female characters in a living, changing context of ideas and experience, especially in their search for creative voice.

1

Introduction

Jane Campbell

Campbell's introductory chapter establishes the basis of her approach. It provides an overview of Byatt's thinking about the challenges of writing fiction in the second half of the twentieth century and proceeds to explore her ambivalent response to feminism.
2

The Shadow of the Sun

Jane Campbell

In this chapter, Campbell dedicates herself to a study of Byatt's first book The Shadow of the Sun.This book demonstrates Byatt's main preoccupations, developing her character types that recur in her fiction and specific topics she continues to explore in later work. Above all, in The Shadow of the Sun Byatt begins her exploration of the female imagination.
3

The Game

Jane Campbell

In this chapter, Campbell looks at Byatt's second novel The Game. Campbell discusses the book's subject and form and how it is Byatt's most Murdochian novel, going beyond The Shadow of the Sun in its investigation of the female imagination.
4

The Virgin in the Garden and Still Life

In this chapter, Campbell looks at Byatt's quartet of novels, specifically looking at the first two novels. She discusses how these novels develop the female Bildungsroman and Byatt's ongoing exploration of language. She also looks at how the four volumes place women in relation to history and culture, constituting an extended reflection on women's power, actual and mythologized, in the context of the intellectual developments of two decades.
5

Sugar and Other Stories

Jane Campbell

In this chapter, Campbell looks at Byatt's first collection of short stories that extends her exploration of the relationship of art and reality. Several of the stories make feminist statements as well as being quiet and pervasive. The short stories are discussed as a melding of thematic and narrative strands that steadily increase their focus on the shaping of the imagination, that is Byatt's metaphor for storytelling.
6

Possession: A Romance

Jane Campbell

In this chapter, Campbell analyzes Byatt's novel Possession: A Romance at great length to show the pivotal significance of this multi-generic text for both Byatt's ongoing experiments with form and her construction of stories for women, past and present. Campbell looks at how Byatt moved into a new mode to explore the continuities and discontinuities between the forms of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century art and thought. The shape of this novel enabled her to combine in a new way the issues and preoccupations of her earlier work, and at the same time to move further away from the use of autobiographical material.
7

Angels and Insects

Jane Campbell

In this chapter, Campbell discusses Byatt's book Angels and Insects where she continues the probing of the Victorian mind and its preoccupations that she began in Possession. The book consists of two novellas that show Byatt's understanding of the problems of Victorian women in relation to language - problems that persist in our time - and both depict women who are able to enter and alter male discourse.
8

The Matisse Stories

Jane Campbell

In this chapter, Campbell discusses Byatt's collection of stories in The Matisse Stories. These stories explore the lives of women, offering implicit comments on the changes and challenges of women's experience in the late twentieth century. They thus extend the preoccupations of Sugar and Other Stories but offer a wider definition of women's creativity.
9

The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye: Five Fairy Stories

Jane Campbell

In this chapter, Campbell discusses The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye: Five Fairy Stories that cleverly subvert the fairy-tale genre, subjecting the form to feminist revision without slipping into the propagandizing Byatt so dislikes. Byatt continues to explore the "wonder, versatile hybrid form" of the "literary fairy tale" that think about human experience and "reflect on the nature of narrative, and of their own narrative in particular."
10

Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice

Jane Campbell

In this chapter, Campbell discusses Byatt's work Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice that consists of six stories that have to do with basic powers or forces: not only fire and water or ice but earth and air and their psychic equivalents. Campbell breaks new ground through her examination of this text that has previously received little critical attention.
11

The Biographer's Tale

Jane Campbell

In this chapter, Campbell discusses Byatt's work The Biographer's Tale that grows naturally out of Byatt's earlier work and contains new developments. The novel asks questions about the accessibility of the past and about or ability to "know" historical characters. It represents Byatt's growing fascination  with biological science and her growing concern for ecology. This is another title Campbell breaks new ground as a title given less critical attention.
12

Babel Tower and A Whistling Woman

Jane Campbell

In this chapter, Campbell discusses Byatt's most recent works Babel Tower and A Whistling Woman. These two texts reflect the fragmented, hectic outer world of the sixties. Again, Campbell breaks new ground with her study of these two books that have often been ignored when critically examining Byatt's writing.