At 20, Antonia Susan Byatt was not yet sure she could write. “Do I take myself seriously as a writer?” she asked herself in her diary in September 1956. “No, I think not.”
The young Byatt – who would go on to become one of Britain’s most celebrated writers, best known for her 1990 novel Possession: A Romance – was troubled by the possibility that her mind might not be equal to her ambitions. Yet her determination was already evident. On her 20th birthday, she wrote: “Today, I know I can do anything. But not yet.”
