A.S. Byatt (Antonia Susan) died recently, and I felt sad, not solely because she died – she had a long life one can only assume was a good one – but because in all of her writing there is an underlying sadness, a pull of longing and missed opportunities for love and connection, of which her death reminded me. Byatt lost her eleven-year-old son when he was killed by a drunk driver while walking home from school; this loss was experienced near the beginning of her teaching and writing careers, and I believe that trauma informs every page she wrote. How I love it, her work, first brought to my attention by the novel Possession: A Romance, although a romance novel as commonly known it most certainly is not, unless you use a broader definition of romance as a thing of mystery and beauty, separate from everyday life. Possession was one of those books I read in a fever, and re-read almost as quickly, especially those last forty or so devastating pages, revealing a vital secret shared then immediately lost to time and chance. For a year or more after finishing the novel, if I thought I needed a good cry I would pick it up and re-read the last few chapters, because every single time, without fail, it hit me where I live, where I believe we all live: right smack dab in the middle of my heart.
Her quartet about the Potter sisters (hm, now I have to wonder, was J.K. influenced by this?!) begins with The Virgin in the Garden, not a great title taken superficially, but the Elizabethan symbolism folded into the book, yes, that virgin, ER, I, is part of what I love about Byatt’s writing. The series continues with Still Life and Babel Tower, finishing with A Whistling Woman; they all sit on my shelf to this day because I remember and value where they took me, to a deep place of introspection, inspiration and anxiety, anxiety for Frederica, for them all, because Byatt does not back away from the scariest bits, the nasty dark nooks of life, from sudden loss and profound grief. How could she, knowing what she knew, having lived what she lived?
I love these novels as well because I am one of three sisters, very different from her fictional set (the writer Margaret Drabble is Byatt’s actual sister), in that we are American, and of a different generation by twenty years plus, yet human experience, feeling, and sibling ‘stuff’ is universal, relatable, well-known. When I read them, some thirty years ago if not more, I doubt I had come across many books, any books, good books, serious writing, about the sister bond or lack thereof that didn’t reduce women, sisters or not, to pale versions of what I knew for a fact, and had lived as a sister to two interesting, complex women.
Byatt and her first husband divorced, and Duffy was her second married name, but she continued to write and speak under her previous husband’s name; a complication to which men simply cannot relate. Regardless of names given, chosen or otherwise, Byatt was, to me, an amazing writer, always interesting and deep. She was also a woman, educator, mother, sister, wife, and a parent who lost a child, a club to which no one wants to belong. Rest in peace, Antonia Susan Drabble Byatt Duffy. And thank you.