A.S. Byatt

Born Antonia Susan Drabble on August 24, 1936 in Sheffield, England, daughter of John F. Drabble and the teacher Kathleen Marie England, Susan is now internationally recognized as A. S. Byatt. Antonia is known most for her novels and short stories. Byatt has an also famous sibling, who is a novelist and critic by the name of Margaret Drabble. It is well know that the two with hold a legendary rivalry. She was educated at a Quaker school in York, New ham College, Cambridge, Pennsylvania, Oxford and several other colleges as a postgraduate. She began lecturing as a senior lecturer in English at the University College England. Her long education and independence ended with her marriage to Ian Byatt.

Her most successful book, “Possession”, A Romance published in 1990, won the Booker Prize for Fiction and the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, and continues to enjoy its popular success. Since becoming a full-time writer, Byatt has published several novels, including “The Oxford Book of English Short Stories”. In this book she edited and reprinted thirty-seven stories, which were selected from the nineteenth and twentieth century’s. One of these stories included in her novel of short stories is “My Story”, which was originally published by John Fuller. In it he described his thought of what each individual’s life story, especially his own would be like. How someone watching from the outside in would have to find or build their own interpretation of his or any life. Another one of the many short stories is “The Telephone” also originally published by John Fuller. In his short story, Fuller describes as his main character drifts deeply in to the thought of “making himself at home” at a so called Dickies place of living. He indulges in thoughts of how he could make himself at home without taking advantage of his friend’s kindness and generosity.

According to the book’s introduction, Byatt was attempting to bring together short stories which she believes to be “works of art that are both startling and satisfying”. Byatt explained “My only criterion was that those stories I selected should be startling and satisfying, and if possible make the hairs on the neck prickle with excitement, aesthetic or narrative”. The stories are by authors ranging from Dickens, Trollope, and Hardy, to J. G. Ballard, Angela Carter, and Ian McEwan and so on. According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._S._Byatt, “…Byatt has been influenced by Henry James and George Elliot as well as Emily Dickinson, T.S. Elliot and Robert