Antonia Susan Drabble Byatt Analysis

Antonia Susan Drabble Byatt 's curiosity to know and to read was associated with her from her childhood: "From being very little, reading and living were all to me only finished off if you could write them down." (qtd. in Musil 100). The sense that writing ended real, or even extra real, one’s knowledgeable growth and leaning and one’s capabilities surely pervades Byatt’s mature work, in both her fiction and nonfiction. In several ways, Byatt is a writer whose writing has been self-reflexive and deliberately formed. Byatt believes that the 'lines ' that the writer selects limit her/him. For Byatt, Words are "crossing circles and loops." The lines we select to "cross" or to be limited describe us (Possession: A Romance 467).

In 1949, when Byatt was thirteen, she and her sister went to a Mount School, a Quaker boarding school in York. Byatt was not an impend child. She was horrified of the outside world and often felt; she says, “panic,” because “I had a strong sense of not knowing how to behave socially, handed down from my mother’s anxiety about having got herself right out of her class." Byatt enhances, "I always knew I had on the wrong clothes” (Stout 15). It seems that some of Byatt’s feelings about school have accomplished their way into her fiction; in The Game, Cassandra has very depraved remembrances of

When she was sent away to school, a colorless eleven years old in liberty bodice, wrinkled, stockings, and a tunic bought prudently one size too large. The other girls were enemies the building menacing, objects threatening: the notice-board with dangerous pins, the gallows-like which they are their Sunday eggs. She wept all night, and then the weeping had spilled over into the day; she sat on benches, immobile, with a wet face, and grew thinner. The terror wore off gradually.