Passions of the Mind: Selected Writings

by A.S. Byatt

The Booker Prize-winning author of Possession and a novelist of “dazzling inventiveness” ( Time ) delivers a stunning collection of essays on literature and life.  

Whether she is writing about George Eliot or Sylvia Plath; Victorian spiritual malaise or Toni Morrison; mythic strands in the novels of Iris Murdoch and Saul Bellow; politics behind the popularity of Barbara Pym or the ambitions that underlie her own fiction, Byatt manages to be challenging, entertaining, and unflinchingly committed to the alliance of literature and life.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Literary Criticism, Criticism, Books About Books, Writing, British Literature

332 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1990

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

[Christine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Byatt writes her criticism as if she is speaking to you. The essays in this collection are all good and enterating. I enjoyed the ones about Browning, Ford, Coleridge and Van Gogh. Now, I want to re-read the books she talked about.

Of more interest to me was her essay about judging the TLS poetry competition. The essay deals with how to teaching writing and her remarks about how writing should be taught stuck a chord.

[Shoshana · Rating 3 out of 5]

I would really put this at 3.5.

The essays I enjoyed i really enjoyed, but it was hard to be engaged about some of the essays which discussed writers I'd never read.

My favorite was her essay on Georgette Heyer, especially the first page was just delightful and I liked how in her essay on Beloved she connected the book to the other novels of the time Beloved is set.

AS Byatt died while I was in the middle of reading this and re-reading her Frederica quartet.

The one thing I think that isn't really obvious in the entire book but comes out at moments is her love of reading and literature and just that makes me happy I read this.

[Lorraine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Oh, this was a slog. :(

I love Byatt the fiction author but find Byatt the critic rather tedious.

We seem to be pretty ideologically opposed on some matters (like feminism and women writers), and many of the essays in this collection just seem cranky and grumpy.

I do appreciate the beginning essays that discuss the influences and theoretical underpinnings of several of her early novels.

[Garnette · Rating 4 out of 5]

Perfectly named book about AS Byatt's own mind as well as the minds of George Eliot and the section she calls: The Female Voice (Cather, Bowen, Plath, Toni Morrison even Georgette Heyer, despite Germaine Greer's ferious dis). I especially liked her attack on Barbara Pym, although I could only stomach two Pyms, I agree with Byatt. I skimmed a lot of the Mind book: not interested or appalled by Freud, post-modernist and post-(WWII)fiction. This is a wonderful book of collected essays by a writer serious about her craft; as a writer I was enlightened by and taught some valuable tools.

[Ci · Rating 3 out of 5]

With some exceptional insights into George Eliot's life and work, I fail to be engaged by this collection of literary critiques. Possibly due my own lapse of not having read Byatt's own work.

*** Notes and quotes***
An interesting quote: Graham Greene argues that “with the death of James the religious sense was lost to the English novel, and with the religious sense went the sense of the importance of the human act. It was as if the world of fiction had lost a dimension: the characters of such distinguished writers as Mrs. Virginia Woolf and Mr. E. M. Forster wandered like cardboard symbols through a world that was paper-thin.”

[Kajah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've read half of the essays in this collection and they are, like most of Byatt's work, top notch in prose quality and quite dense. I especially appreciated her lengthy quotations (which she explains in the introduction) and her ridiculously learnéd insight into authors like Browning. I did not read the essays on authors I'm not familiar with for obvious reasons, but I'll definitely be returning to this little volume in the future

[Alexandra · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read for the Georgette Heyer essay, which is quite good. Also, great essay on Willa Cather. Unfinished due to skipping essays whose subject matter I'm unfamiliar with.

[Kathleen Valentine · Rating 4 out of 5]

A must-read for any writer.

[Karen]

Maybe my humour when I started this; but too wordy at the time; and the topics demonstrated to me that I had not read serious literature in some time. I should try again sometime.

[Helen Geng]

DNF--skimmed