A remarkable, sumptuously illustrated exploration of the interplay between fiction and portraits, between novelist and artist – by the acclaimed Booker Prize winner. Portraits seem the opposite of fiction, fixed in time and space, not running with the curve of a story or a life. Yet since the birth of the novel, writers have been fascinated by portraits as icons, as motifs, as images of character and evocations of past time. In this intriguing and provocative book, A.S. Byatt delves into the complex relations between portraits and characters, and between portraits and novels as whole works of art. Her authors range from Henry James to Iris Murdoch, her artists from Holbein to Botticelli, Manet to the present day. She looks at the way writers use portraits to conjure up the past, as in Ford Madox Ford’s The Fifth Queen and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. She explores their erotic use, the idea of painting as a sexual act, full of danger. And she examines the creation of fictional portrait painters by writers like Balzac and Zola, whose writing was closely linked, in different ways, to the art of Cezanne. A portrait can defy the process of age but its very stillness can also seem like death. Art can be a murderer. And sometimes, as in Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh, a portrait can itself become the victim of Gothic rage. In her own novels, A.S. Byatt has often evoked the power of portraits. Calling on a host of illustrations, she invites us to share the writer’s preoccupation with the painted image. A feast for the eye and for the imagination, Portraits in Fiction is a remarkable and immensely enjoyable exploration of the marriage of two great genres.
Author
A.S. Byatt (Antonia Susan Byatt) is internationally known for her novels and short stories. Her novels include the Booker Prize winner Possession, The Biographer’s Tale and the quartet, The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower and A Whistling Woman, and her highly acclaimed collections of short stories include Sugar and Other Stories, The Matisse Stories, The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye, Elementals and her most recent book Little Black Book of Stories. A distinguished critic as well as a writer of fiction, A S Byatt was appointed CBE in 1990 and DBE in 1999. BYATT, Dame Antonia (Susan), (Dame Antonia Duffy), DBE 1999 (CBE 1990); FRSL 1983; Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (France), 2003, writer; born 24 Aug. 1936; Daughter of His Honour John Frederick Drabble, QC and late Kathleen Marie Bloor Byatt has famously been engaged in a long-running feud with her novelist sister, Margaret Drabble, over the alleged appropriation of a family tea-set in one of her novels. The pair seldom see each other and each does not read the books of the other. Married 1st, 1959, Ian Charles Rayner Byatt (Sir I. C. R. Byatt) marriage dissolved. 1969; one daughter (one son deceased) 2nd, 1969, Peter John Duffy; two daughters. Education Sheffield High School; The Mount School, York; Newnham College, Cambridge (BA Hons; Hon. Fellow 1999); Bryn Mawr College, Philadelphia, USA; Somerville College, Oxford. Academic Honours: Hon. Fellow, London Inst., 2000; Fellow UCL, 2004 Hon. DLitt: Bradford, 1987; DUniv York, 1991; Durham, 1991; Nottingham, 1992; Liverpool, 1993; Portsmouth, 1994; London, 1995; Sheffield, 2000; Kent 2004; Hon. LittD Cambridge, 1999 Prizes The PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Of Fiction prize, 1986 for STILL LIFE The Booker Prize, 1990, for POSSESSION Irish Times/Aer Lingus International Fiction Prize, 1990 for POSSESSION The Eurasian section of Best Book in Commonwealth Prize, 1991 for POSSESSION Premio Malaparte, Capri, 1995; Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature, California, 1998 for THE DJINN IN THE NIGHTINGALE''S EYE Shakespeare Prize, Toepfer Foundation, Hamburg, 2002; Publications: The Shadow of the Sun, 1964; Degrees of Freedom, 1965 (reprinted as Degrees of Freedom: the early novels of Iris Murdoch, 1994); The Game, 1967; Wordsworth and Coleridge in their Time, 1970 (reprinted as Unruly Times: Wordsworth and Coleridge in their Time, 1989); Iris Murdoch 1976 The Virgin in the Garden, 1978; GEORGE ELIOT Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings, 1979 (editor); Still Life, 1985 Sugar and Other Stories, 1987; George Eliot: selected essays, 1989 (editor) Possession: a romance, 1990 Robert Browning''s Dramatic Monologues, 1990 (editor); Passions of the Mind, (essays), 1991; Angels and Insects (novellas),1992 The Matisse Stories (short stories),1993; The Djinn in the Nightingale''s Eye: five fairy stories, 1994 Imagining Characters, 1995 (joint editor); New Writing 4, 1995 (joint editor); Babel Tower, 1996; New Writing 6, 1997 (joint editor); The Oxford Book of English Short Stories, 1998 (editor); Elementals: Stories of fire and ice (short stories), 1998; The Biographer''s Tale, 2000; On Histories and Stories (essays), 2000; Portraits in Fiction, 2001; The Bird Hand Book, 2001 (Photographs by Victor Schrager Text By AS Byatt); A Whistling Woman, 2002 Little
