Dame Antonia Susan Duffy (née Drabble; 24 August 1936 – 16 November 2023), known professionally by her former married name, A. S. Byatt (/ˈbaɪ.ət/ BY-ət),[1] was an English critic, novelist, poet and short-story writer.

The Virgin in the Garden (1978) was the first of The Quartet,[4] a tetralogy of novels that continued with Still Life (1985), Babel Tower (1996) and A Whistling Woman (2002).

[7] An unhappy child, Byatt did not enjoy boarding school, citing her need to be alone and her difficulty in making friends.

[2] They had a daughter together,[14] as well as a son, Charles, who was killed by a drunk-driver at the age of 11 while walking home from school.

[2][7][10] She spoke of her son's death and its influence on her lecturing and subsequent career after publishing The Children's Book, in which the image of a dead child features.

[15][7][14] Byatt's relationship with her sister Margaret Drabble was sometimes strained due to the presence of autobiographical elements in both their writing.

While their relationship was no longer especially close and they did not read each other's books, Drabble described the situation as "normal sibling rivalry"[16] and Byatt said it had been "terribly overstated by gossip columnists.

[2] After departing Cambridge, she spent one year as a postgraduate student in the United States and began her second novel, The Game, continuing to write it at Oxford when she returned to England.

[2] Byatt's book features a powerful death scene, which she invented in 1961 (inspired by Byatt's reading of Angus Wilson's book The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot and the accident in its opening), a death scene that has drawn complaints from numerous readers for its vividness.

[2] Describing mid-20th-century Britain, the books follow the life of Frederica Potter, a young intellectual studying at Cambridge at a time when women were heavily outnumbered by men at that university, and then tracing her journey as a divorcée with a young son as he makes a new life in London.

[6] The Matisse Stories (1993) features three pieces, each describing a painting by the eponymous painter; each is the tale of an initially smaller crisis that shows the long-present unravelling in the protagonists' lives.

[2] Possession (1990) parallels the emerging relationship of two contemporary academics with the lives of two (fictional) 19th-century poets whom they are researching.

[2] Phineas Gilbert Nanson is named after an insect and is almost an anagram of Galton, Ibsen and Linnaeus, though Byatt said this was an uncanny coincidence that she did not realise until afterwards.

[2] The Children's Book, published in 2009, is a novel spanning from 1895 until the end of the First World War, centring on the fictional writer Olive Wellwood.

[14] The novel also features Rupert Brooke, Emma Goldman, Auguste Rodin, George Bernard Shaw, Virginia Woolf and Oscar Wilde, all appearing as themselves.

[14] Byatt initially intended to title the book The Hedgehog, the White Goose and the Mad March Hare.

[14] She wrote at her home in Putney, West London, and at another house in the Cévennes in Southern France, where she spent her summers.

[25] Byatt wrote two critical studies of Dame Iris Murdoch, who was a friend, mentor and another significant influence on her own writing.

[6] Byatt also described Murdoch's husband John Bayley's decision to publish a memoir of his time with her as "wicked" and "unforgivable", saying: "I knew her enough to know that she would have hated it... it's had a horrible effect on how people feel about her and see her and think about her.

[6] Byatt had been a public encourager of the new young generation of British writers, including Philip Hensher (Kitchen Venom),[7][10] Robert Irwin (Exquisite Corpse),[10] A. L. Kennedy,[10] Lawrence Norfolk,[7][10] David Mitchell (Ghostwritten),[7][10] Ali Smith (Hotel World),[7][10] Zadie Smith (White Teeth)[10] and Adam Thirlwell,[7] saying in 2009 that she was "not entirely disinterested, because I wish there to be a literary world in which people are not writing books only about people's feelings ... all the ones I like write also about ideas".

[7] She contrasted some of those preferences with the work of Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan and Graham Swift—then added, "In fact I admire all four of those writers... they don't only do people's feelings... nevertheless it's become ossified".

[30][13] She was also awarded: The following books form a tetralogy known as The Quartet: The Virgin in the Garden (1978), Still Life (1985), Babel Tower (1996) and A Whistling Woman (2002).