A.S. Byatt

I have been re-reading A.S. Byatt's four Frederica Potter books non-stop for the past few days. I needed some pure escapism and I find that the combination of Byatt's prose, which is absorbing because of its sheer physicality and sensuality, and her quirky characters, keeps me deep in the books for hours on end.

The reason I started reading/re-reading was that I finally managed to buy a copy of the Virgin in the Garden, the first in the series. For some reason I had never managed to find this in a bookshop - maybe it was out of print for a while. I think I actually read the books in the order 3-2-4-1 which is not exactly logical. I bought Babel Tower in hardback at a remnants sale in 1996-97, then Still Life in paperback shortly afterwards. I then bought A Whistling Woman in hardback when it was published in 2002 (by this time I had almost everything else of Byatt's except Virgin and wanted to read more) and then finally this year I bought the first book.

It's been interesting to read them one after another - apart from anything else; it answers a few basic questions about the plot (I was never quite sure where the mysterious Ottakar brothers had appeared from). But it also gives each event its correct dramatic weight. Almost didn't notice the death of Stephanie in the second book, because my focus was so much on the dominant personality of Frederica. Virgin, however, made me realise the importance of Stephanie (and lack of Stephanie in books three and four of the quartet) because she is emphatically not a subsidiary character in the first book. She is the foil to Frederica, she goes before her in everything (including, crucially, marriage), she may be a more submissive personality but we can see the roots of so much of Frederica's character in her.

I don't think I had realised quite how much Frederica's life follows Byatt's life. I wouldn't want to say that the novels are entirely auto-biographical, because quite frankly, no-one's life is that interesting, but there are endless similarities: the two sisters born into a literary family; the young woman at Newnham; the struggles of a young writer; teaching at an Art College. I wonder what Margaret Drabble makes of Byatt's decision to kill off the elder sister in the novels?

I haven't quite finished The Whistling Woman yet, so I may have more to write later.