Byatt, A. S.

(Antonia Susan Byatt)(bī´ət), 1936–, British novelist; sister of Margaret Drabble. Educated at Cambridge, Bryn Mawr College, Pa., and Oxford, she is a noted critic and novelist whose work is erudite, subtle, and passionate. Her best-known novel, Possession (1989)—at once a mystery, a work of Victorian literary scholarship, a romance, and a philosophical inquiry into the nature of love—won the Booker Prize. Byatt's other fiction includes a quartet of novels, The Virgin in the Garden (1978), Still-Life (1985), Babel Tower (1996), and A Whistling Woman (2002), centered around a Yorkshire family and exploring modern English life, as well as the novella Angels and Insects (1992) and the novel The Biographer's Tale (2001), both of which examine Victorian times with a contemporary sensibility. She is also known for studies of Iris Murdoch (1965, 1976) and other literary essays, e.g., Passions of the Mind (1992) and On Histories and Stories (2000); short stories, e.g., Matisse Stories (1993), Elementals (1999), and Little Black Book of Stories (2004); and fairy tales (1997).