A Stone Woman

by A.S. Byatt

Following the death of her mother, an elderly woman begins to undergo a transfiguration. Her body grows flinty, toughens and crystallises. An Icelandic stonemason she meets in a graveyard becomes her sole confidant. As her inexorable metamorphosis continues, the stories he has to tell of his homeland and its legends begin to resonate.

Part of the Storycuts series, this short story was originally published in the collection Little Black Book of Stories.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Fantasy

58 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 17, 2011

About the 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

Reviews

[Cecily · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reality meets myth in the wilds of Iceland: a geologically young country with ancient culture and beliefs. Organic meets inorganic: a visceral revulsion at flesh which inevitably decays, contrasted with passion for the enduring beauty of rocks, minerals, and wild weather.


Image: Three typical Iceland landscapes. Source.

Ines, a writer of dictionaries, has just been bereaved of the mother she shared a home with. The colour leaches out of her life. Perhaps death lurks for her, too. Then, gradually, something extraordinary happens.

Transformation
Her body turns to stone. Not just any stone, but beautiful patterns of gems and minerals of all shapes and colours: “her torso was wrapped in a stony encrustation”, but “her compressed innards were still fluid and soft”.

The resulting kaleidoscope is multisensory: glassy dust that catches the light; whorls, ridges, and sharp edges, and even the sounds of stone against stone. “A new curiosity jostled the horror” and she comes to take wondrous delight in the unexpected beauty - as well as the etymology of the words for different rocks and minerals.

Her transfiguration is not from “warm change and decay to… cold permanence” because many minerals come from living things. Her blood turns to lava. Increasingly, “She thought human thoughts and stone thoughts. The latter were slow, patchily coloured, textured and extreme, both hot and cold. They did not translate into the English language.”

The more mineralised she becomes, the more alive she is to nature. An oxymoronic metaphor?

The title uses the indefinite article (“a”, rather than “the”). This metamorphosis is not unique.

Mythology
“The hillside was alive with eyes, that opened lazily within fringing mossy lashes, that stared through and past her from hollows in stones, that flashed in the light briefly and vanished again.”


Image: Small eruption in eruption in Holuhraun. Source.

In Iceland, where you see “glacial tongues pouring down into the plains”, new rocks are constantly birthed by geological activity, then transformed by extreme weather. Some stones are alive. The boundaries between the concrete human world and a more mystical one are blurred.

Quotes
• “She busied herself… with tidying love away.”
• “She thought of herself in the past tense… The life had gone out of the furnishings and objects.”
• “The human world of stones is caught in organic metaphors like flies in amber… Carnelian is from carnal, from flesh.”
• “The stone carver worked with the earth and the weather as his assistants and controllers.”
• “Time too was paradoxical in Iceland. The summer was a fleeting island of light and brightness in a shroud of thick vapours and freezing needles of ice in the air. But within the island of the summer the daylight was sempiternal, there was no nightfall, only the endless shifts in the colour of the sky… and, as the autumn put out boisterous fingers, flowing with the gyrating and swooping veils of the aurora borealis.”


Image: Rock, gemstone, moss? Hard to tell. Source.

This story was published in Byatt’s “The Little Black Book of Stories”. See my review HERE for discussion of the shared themes, as well as reviews of the other four stories.

See also

• For atmosphere, see Daisy Johnson's Fen. It is a collection of mythic, mystical short stories, focused on young women, and set in the Fens of contemporary England. One of the stories there has echoes of this. See my review HERE.

• For a somewhat similar mystical bodily transformation, see Ali Smith's short story The beholder (see my review of her collection, Public library HERE).

[Marc Lamot · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ovid's Metamorphoses stories are well known. In this short story (60 p) Byatt ventures into something similar, namely the extremely meticulous description of a woman who 'petrifies'. The process is set in motion the day she finds her mother dead in her seat. Through the eyes of the woman we then slowly discover new types of minerals on and in her body, and through a stonemason she ends up in Iceland, the country 'where stone is alive' and she can lead a new life. Byatt's message is clear: the mineral world is not cold and dead, but varied and varying, 'animated' like the organic one. This is a wonderful gem that lends itself to more interpretations, as with Ovid.

[Serena · Rating 4 out of 5]

You can listen to parts 1 & 2 (of 3) on BBC now.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

From BBC Radio 4:
Episode 1 of 3:
Ines is a middle-aged etymologist.

When her mother dies, grief overtakes her.

Then, after a minor surgery, she discovers her navel has turned to flint.

Episode 2 of 3:
Ines worries what will happen if her transformation turns volcanic.

Then she meets Thorsteinn, the mysterious stone-cutter who offers her help in the form of a visit to Iceland.

Episode 3 of 3:
As Ines' petrification continues, she can now no longer speak and can barely make out Thorsteinn's form with her fading vision.

But another world is opening up to her - a world she finds both terrifying and compelling.

AS Byatt's sensuous and ultimately uplifting account of one woman's transformation into stone.

Read by the acclaimed actress Penelope Wilton.

Producer: Claudine Toutoungi

[Paula · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this story! It was so imaginative, so beautifully descriptive! Penelope Wilson (of "Downton Abbey" fame) did an excellent job of reading with color and meaning. It's too bad the BBC put this in the "horror" section-- It's really a story of self-discovery and finding one's freedom, and of a selfless love between Ines and the stone carver Thorsteinn.

[Sorkunde · Rating 5 out of 5]

A modern gothic tale musing on grief.
Ines is a Briitish scholar (etymologist) who is undergoing a metamorphoses that leaves her 'petrified".

The slow transformation into a statue starts in England and progresses on a wild country inhabited by elves, trolls, earth monsters, and stones who are thought to be alive.

A.S. Byatt's brilliant writing draws poetic comparisons between nature and humankind.

All natural phenomenas and creatures are observed from a human perspective, which is a bit of a precarious perspective in this land...

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

genius, fascinating, and really took some turns from the outset when a woman starts turning to stone after the death of her mother - I didn't see Iceland coming!
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...

[Dani Hayman]

Read for Women's Lit course

[Krystl · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. This really needs to be released on it's own on rough-cut textured paper with woodcut illustrations. Please, somebody make this happen.

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

I saw parallels to Systemic Sclerosis.

[T · Rating 5 out of 5]

Haven't read Byatt for years since I read Possession.

[Barney · Rating 4 out of 5]

(Audiobook, BBC) Swept me along

[Sarah · Rating 2 out of 5]

Fantastic vocabulary of stone, mineral and geological terminology but not a very interesting story.

[Hope Tull · Rating 3 out of 5]

Women’s kit

[Narda · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved, loved, loved this story.
It is originally from a collection called 'the little black book'
I read it often & have shared it & recommended it.
Byatt's short stories really sparkle.
I don't really like her novels as much.

[Noodles · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating short story of transformation and change in life, both physical and in spirit.
Beautiful, evocative and really strange.
Well worth reading, I did the audiobook and will listen to it again sometime.

[Kate · Rating 3 out of 5]

An atmospheric, twisting story about a woman whose scars start spreading after intestinal surgery. I liked the descriptions of Iceland and the charming bits of folklore woven into the tale.