If English writing has stopped being a matter of small relationships and delicate social blunders, and has turned its attention to the larger questions of history, art, and the life of ideas, it is largely due to the generous example of Byatt’s wide-ranging ambition.
The current, almost bewildering gusto of inquiry in contemporary English writing owes an enormous amount to the example of Possession, which is the first, grandest and best example of that alluring form, the romance of the archive the scientific fantasy of “Morpho Eugenia,” too, has proved enormously instructive to younger writers. No novelist, perhaps, has done so much to widen the range of English fiction. She is not a writer one can imagine being tempted to write a memoir: solipsism is not in her nature. The impression given by her houses is confirmed by her conversation, which moves confidently between literature, biology, the fine arts, and theoretical preoccupations and displays a mind turned always outwards. Both are filled with art, predominantly by her contemporaries, libraries of extravagant, Borgesian range and curiosa of many kinds, hinting at her unusual fecundity of mind: exotic preserved insects, the intricate examples of Venetian millefiori glassware and objects rare and fascinating of all imaginable varieties. Byatt lives and writes in her handsome west London house and, in the summer months, in her house in the south of France. Interviewed by Philip Hensher Issue 159, Fall 2001Ī.
0 kommentar(er)
