In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

1 Introduction “All my books are about the woman artist—in that sense, they’re terribly feminist books—and they’re about what language is.” In this statement , made in 1990 in an interview with Nicolas Tredell (66), A.S. Byatt described her fiction up to the end of the eighties, supplementing her definition the following year when she said that her novels “think about the problem of female vision, female art and thought” (Introduction, The Shadow of the Sun xiv).With one exception, The Biographer’s Tale (2000), her fiction has continued to explore and expand this subject. Her two early novels, The Shadow of the Sun, originally titled Shadow of a Sun (1964), and The Game (1967), look at the possibilities of and the barriers to female vision, and the first two volumes of her “Powerhouse” quartet, The Virgin in the Garden (1978) and Still Life (1985), chronicle the intellectual and emotional progress of two sisters as they encounter the world of the 1950s. Byatt’s first collection of short stories, Sugar (1987), begins with a portrait of a bright, frustrated schoolgirl with a passionate love for Racine’s plays and concludes with a mature woman’s reflections on the shaping work of the imagination. In the fiction of the nineties and in A Whistling Woman (2002), which, with Babel Tower (1996), completes her quartet, the focus widens.Although some of Byatt’s women, most notably Christabel in Possession (1990), are literary artists, Byatt now seems even more concerned with women as thinkers and searchers for wisdom. In the two novellas that make up Angels and Insects (1992), Byatt continues the reconstruction of nineteenth-century women’s lives that she began in Possession; the women in both novellas, “Morpho Eugenia” and the 1 “Conjugial Angel,” work to counter patriarchal structures.The three short story collections of the decade, The Matisse Stories (1993), The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye (1994), and Elementals (1998), place women in relation to non-literary art forms, to storytelling, and to the challenges of assuming the authorship of their own lives.With Babel Tower (1996) and A Whistling Woman, the quartet—whose first two volumes appeared to promise a portrait of the artist as a young woman—has become a study of women’s experience, physical, mental, and emotional. Byatt’s description of her work as “heliotropic” (Introduction, Shadow xiv), turning to the sun of creativity , holds true in two senses: she explores and develops her own relation to the sun, and she shows her women characters experiencing adventures of the mind and feelings that bring them into the sun’s light. (The image of the heliotrope has an even more personal relevance for Byatt: she suffers from sad, seasonal affective disorder, and does much of her writing in the summers in the Cévennes in France.) In this book I hope to address both aspects and to show how, in fiction published over a span of thirty-eight years, Byatt has constantly deepened her thinking about her craft and extended her range of knowledge and practice; using a variety of forms, she has worked to encompass more and more of reality . While doing so, she has kept women’s lives, past and present, at the centre of her attention. From her earliest work, however, Byatt’s interest in male ways of seeing has been evident, and, as well, the first volumes of her quartet are social and intellectual history as well as family chronicle. Her imagination grapples with the whole world of the given and the contingent. This breadth of view underlies her objection to being classified as a “woman’s novelist.” In the complex worlds of Byatt’s fiction, women’s voices are in dialogue with those from the male tradition. Her feminism is thoughtfully described by Richard Todd, who sees Byatt (and Marina Warner) as working in a “total field” that includes a wide range of artistic forms. Within this field, he says, feminism “operates as an augmentation of a total discourse, rather than as a simplistic replacement of what has been traditionally privileged by what has been traditionally marginalized ” (“Retrieval” 99). In my study I have tried to respect Byatt’s own principles, offering close readings of her texts as wholes while giving particular attention to the portrayal of the experience and especially the creativity of women. In arguing for the feminist power and relevance of her fiction, I have made use of feminist scholarship when it seems...

Share