It was always a joy to receive an email from the Booker prizewinning novelist AS Byatt. It might range from Nietzsche to newts to the weather in northern France (where she had a house) to the splitting migraine she’d had since Tuesday and why some writer was completely misguided about something or other. But no, she was dreadfully sorry, but she couldn’t write anything because she was deep in a novel of her own. And PS have I read the new novel from [insert name of as yet unheard-of novelist], it is really terrifically good.
Her email address was “arachne” (she was fascinated by insects and myths), she would sign off as ASD (after her second husband, Peter Duffy) and many people called her the Dame (she received a damehood in 1999). A quintessential bluestocking and unrepentant intellectual, AS Byatt was literary nobility for many years. The eldest of four (her sister is the novelist Margaret Drabble), Byatt was born in Sheffield in 1936. The family later moved to York. Her father was a QC and a Quaker, her mother a Browning scholar, and theirs was a bookish household that prized cleverness above everything.
