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A. S. Byatt’s is fiction of great richness, with an idiosyncratic combination of seriousness and playfulness. Her mind has been formed by two things that rarely come together — the moral debate of the English nonconformist mind, and the playful investigations of a more international tradition.

Her books are immensely varied. There are the exquisite late stories inspired by fairytales; the fable-like investigations of the interactions of life and literature, such as The Biographer’s Tale and Possession (the 1990 Booker-winner). On a smaller scale, in the short stories of Sugar, she can be classically restrained; on a larger, in the Frederica quartet, she orchestrates a flood of history, high drama and ideas with considerable power.

She is one of those rare English novelists for whom romantic love is only one of a number of interesting subjects. Science has come to interest her greatly. In the Frederica books, a sociologist and historian of ideas seems to be at work alongside the novelist of personal growth. The quartet engages with the fantastic and the imaginative in unusually committed ways. Babel Tower, placing de Sade and Tolkienesque fantasies at the centre of the 1960s, is the most overwhelming in the series. But the magnificent ambition of the first, The Virgin in the Garden, deserves special mention. Its complex interplay of real and idealised national life in a 1953 Yorkshire landscape easily surpasses its model, Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts.

This supremely ambitious novel was written in the mid-1970s, when literary historians will tell you that the English novel was in the doldrums. There have not been many since to match it, and quite a lot that have were by A. S. Byatt.

One to read: The Virgin in the Garden (1978)

Philip Hensher is a novelist and journalist. He studied at Oxford and Cambridge, where he wrote his thesis on 18th-century painting and worked at the House of Commons before becoming a full-time writer. His novels include The Mulberry Empire, a love story set in the first Anglo-Afghan war, and he wrote the libretto for Thomas Adés’ opera Powder Her Face.

More about A. S. Byatt

Why Harry Potter is so successful, a 2003 essay by A S Byatt

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