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2 The Shadow of the Sun In Byatt’s first novel, most of her main preoccupations are already apparent. Here she develops character types that, with important variations , recur in her fiction: the ambitious young woman, the disappointed older woman, the visionary genius. Here, too, Byatt introduces specific topics she continues to explore in later work: the tendency of fiction to be parasitic on life and the tendency of criticism, in turn, to feed off and distort creative writing. The human cost of the writer’s life, the toll it can take on human relationships, is to be returned to again and again in Byatt’s fiction.Above all, in The Shadow of the Sun Byatt begins her exploration of the female imagination. In 1991 Vintage published a reissue of Byatt’s first novel, under the title Byatt had originally preferred, The Shadow of the Sun (rather than Shadow of a Sun, the title suggested by her editor, Cecil Day Lewis, and used for the book’s first appearance in 1964), and with an introduction by Byatt. Reflecting retrospectively on her novel’s genesis, Byatt identifies the two problems the novel presented: the human and the literary.The primary human problem was the issue of women, work, and men; the second problem was the relationship of the creative writer to the literary critic who interprets his or her work. These two subjects form the two intertwined plots of the novel. The literary problem was that of finding a suitable form. “I had awful problems with the form,” says Byatt in the introduction, adding that she lacked appropriate models. The novels of Elizabeth Bowen, Rosamund Lehmann, E.M. Forster, and Virginia Woolf were “too suffused with ‘sensibility’”; on the other hand, the “joky social 27 comedy of [Kingsley] Amis and [John] Wain” appealed even less (xi). There were other influences—Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse, another novel of sensibility, and two much more significant and lasting ones, Marcel Proust and Iris Murdoch, whose work Byatt read between the first and second drafts of Shadow; “but the underlying shape…is dictated by Elizabeth Bowen and Rosamund Lehmann, and a vague dissatisfaction with this state of affairs” (xii). Although this inherited underlying shape is discernible in Shadow— in its use of the form of the female Bildungsroman, its diffuseness (reminiscent especially of Lehmann), and its descriptions, both praised and deplored by the original reviewers, of what one reviewer called “the emotional convolutions behind each utterance” (“Living with a Genius” 21)— Byatt goes further beyond these models than she may have realized. Through Anna, Byatt examines a problem from her own experience, the contradictions faced by young women in the fifties and sixties who, having fought hard for their places at university, felt forced to choose between work and love: “Men could have both…, but it seemed that women couldn’t” (ix). She recalls the attitude of her thesis supervisor, Helen Gardner, “who believed, and frequently said, that a woman had to be dedicated like a nun, to achieve anything as a mind”—an ideal of an “unsexed mind” that Byatt instinctively rejected (ix). These conflicts underlie Byatt’s portrait of her heroine, who, with creative ambitions of her own, lives in the shadow of her father, Henry, a visionary and a successful novelist. He, “being male, could have what [Anna] and I felt we perhaps ought not to want, singlemindedness, art, vision” (ix). Anna’s problem—of finding her own vision and the means of expressing it—is thus the same as that encountered by her creator. Anna and her search for a female vision are set off against the figure of Henry, the male visionary who is derived in part from D.H. Lawrence, a presence who both attracts and repels Byatt; she finds his writing “powerfully moving” (xiv) but also “violent and savage” and “coercive” (xii). Henry does not share Lawrence’s views, nor does he wish to force his vision on others, but his single-minded dedication and, above all, the dangerous alluring brightness of his imaginative world link him with Lawrence, challenging the would-be woman artist. Anna is important in the secondary plot also, for she is the figure over whom her father and his leading critic, Oliver Canning , confront each other, each claiming a natural affinity with her.The “battle” of the novel, Byatt observes, inevitably “fought itself out between sexuality, literary criticism, and writing” (viii). “[In] any male...

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