AS Byatt, ingenious and cerebral novelist who won the Booker Prize for Possession – obituary

Dame Antonia Byatt, the novelist AS Byatt, who has died aged 87, was once described as the most consciously intellectual woman writer since George Eliot; her dense, cerebral fiction looked set never to command a large public until her novel Possession won the Booker Prize in 1990 and transformed her into an international literary celebrity.

In her first quarter-century as a novelist she rarely sought to inspire “narrative greed” – the term she coined for a reader’s feverish compulsion to turn the pages. But with Possession, which became an worldwide bestseller, she allowed herself for the first time to deploy what she had learnt from her beloved Georgette Heyer as well as her usual models, Proust and DH Lawrence.

Possession told the story of two romances: a love affair between two Victorian poets, and the parallel narrative of two present-day academics trying to uncover the truth about that relationship and falling for each other in the process. AS Byatt forsook the lengthy interior monologues of her earlier fiction and, in concentrating on the drama of the narrative, revealed the full power of her artistry.

She included generous chunks of dazzling, Browning-esque pastiche verse, but it was her ingenious plot, combining elements of detective, romantic and historical fiction, that most delighted her readers.

Reviewers were effusive on both sides of the Atlantic. The Washington Post observed that “Book critics are paid to offer informed, careful judgments ... but sometimes all we really want to say about a novel is ‘Wow!’ ” The book’s appeal endured, and was undented by Neil LaBute’s clodhopping film version of 2002, starring Gwyneth Paltrow.

It was generally agreed, however, that for good or ill the real, cask-strength Byatt was found in The Frederica Quartet, a series of four novels following the travails of a Cambridge-educated woman in the male-dominated world of the 1950s and 1960s. Every intellectual and scientific idea current during the period seemed to be discussed by the characters at some point.

The first volume, The Virgin in the Garden (1978), was a “large, complex, ambitious work, humming with energy and ideas”, according to Iris Murdoch in The New Statesman. The Times Literary Supplement, on the other hand, complained that “the author’s commitment is to her ideas rather than to the imaginative life of her story”, and critical opinion remained divided over the subsequent three volumes: Still Life (1985), Babel Tower (1997) and A Whistling Woman (2002).

Robert Macfarlane noted in The Observer that the Quartet was marred by “excessive use of symbols (spiders, spirals, fire, webs, mirrors), a narrative gnarliness, an overbearing sense of allegory”, and spoke for many critics when he complained of “the ludicrous names of almost all the characters… and the not infrequent stylistic botches. At one point, for instance, two dogs come into a room ‘agitating their sterns’, which I presume is a ghastly attempt to say ‘wagging their tails’ without, for some reason, saying so.”

Nevertheless, AS Byatt attained a huge readership in the latter half of her career. This, she thought, was because her novels offered an alternative to the solipsism of much contemporary fiction – “there are a lot of other women who are just writing me-books” – by exploring art, philosophy and the natural world in depth.

The range of people her novels encompassed was not wide – she favoured professors, poets, authors, literary archaeologists – but her belief that thinking and writing were, of themselves, passionate emotions enabled her to give her characters vitality.

She was also prolific as a critic, commentator, broadcaster and committee member, and was described by AN Wilson as one of “the tricoteuses who grace every London literary occasion” along with Beryl Bainbridge and Bernice Rubens.

She was never afraid to speak her mind. In 1994 she accused Martin Amis, with whom she shared a publisher, of “a kind of male turkey cocking” after he demanded an advance he was unlikely to earn out – “I don’t see why I should subsidise his greed, simply because he has a divorce to pay for and has just had all his teeth redone.” John Bayley was “wicked” for writing a memoir of the mental decline of his wife Iris Murdoch.

In 2003 she slaughtered a sacred cow by arguing in The New York Times that the Harry Potter books were derivative and unambitious; a Daily Telegraph editorial responded by aiming similar criticisms at AS Byatt herself, noting that “Possession was perhaps the best potboiler of the past two decades, but potboiler it was… it was a love story Barbara Cartland would have been proud of.” She proved she was no generic snob, however, as one of the literary establishment’s most vocal champions of Terry Pratchett.

To her immense frustration, what interested the press most about her was her difficult relationship with her younger sister Margaret Drabble, who became a bestselling novelist some decades before Antonia achieved the same feat. They were cast as the Olivia de Havilland and Joan Fontaine of the literary world, and there were suggestions that Antonia’s late success was driven by a determination not just to escape Margaret’s shadow but to eclipse her in turn. If this was true, she arguably succeeded.

Antonia Susan Drabble, known in the family as Sue, was born on August 24 1936 in Sheffield, the eldest of four children. Ill in bed with asthma for much of her childhood, she read voraciously, later describing herself as being “kept alive by fictions”.

Both her parents had studied at Cambridge but while her father, John, went into the law and became a circuit judge, her mother Kathleen was obliged to devote herself to her home and children, and her bitterness infused their upbringing. “She was very, very angry, and all her daughters learnt the lesson that if you need to think, you had better make provision for working and having a life of your own,” Antonia recalled.

Educated by Quakers at the Mount School in York, she made no friends and sought the traditional refuge of small, bookish girls in literature. But after winning a scholarship to Newnham College, Cambridge, she flourished, gaining a First in English, and subsequently worked on a doctoral thesis on 17th-century literature at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania and Somerville College, Oxford, although she never completed it.

In 1959 she left Oxford and married Ian (later Sir Ian) Byatt, who would become a leading economist; they had a son and a daughter.

As her sister Margaret began to outshine her, taking a starred First at Cambridge and publishing a novel that saw her become one of the leading literary lights of Swinging London, AS Byatt was afflicted by a feeling “that I wasn’t a real person, that there was somebody coming who was the real person and that everybody would see I hadn’t been there”. It was partly this sense of her own lack of existence that prompted her to give her daughter her own name, Antonia.

In 1962 she began to carve out an identity apart from motherhood, taking a part-time job teaching English literature at the Central School of Arts and Design and the University of London. She published her first novel, Shadow of a Sun, which she had been working on since she was at school, in 1964; it described the romantic torments of the daughter of a famous novelist who gains self-awareness through an unwanted pregnancy.

The following year she published Degrees of Freedom, a study of Iris Murdoch, and then in 1967 her second novel, The Game, about the relationship between two sisters. Margaret Drabble, in an interview with The Daily Telegraph in 2011, called it “a mean-spirited book about sibling rivalry … she sent it to me with a note signed ‘With love,’ saying ‘I think I owe you an apology’. ” AS Byatt herself called the book “a technical exercise in which I worked out how to do metaphors”, and many reviewers considered it too drily cerebral.

The writer DJ Taylor, commenting on photographs of Antonia Byatt during this period, described her as “a striking young woman, halfway between a Morley College bluestocking of the Victorian era and Vanessa Redgrave in Antonioni’s Blow-Up”. She was divorced in 1969 and in the same year married Peter Duffy, with whom she had two more daughters.

In 1972 her son Charles, aged 11, was struck and killed by a drink-driver. Antonia Duffy had been reluctantly planning to take up a lectureship at University College, London, to help pay for Charles’s school fees; she was so devastated that she gave up writing and reviewing, and could think of no alternative but to take the job.

She was intellectually paralysed by grief, until, as she recalled, “I remember once sort of sitting down and thinking, ‘I am terribly depressed and this can not go on…’ and then I thought, ‘Well, you can do two things. You can kill yourself or you can get interested in absolutely everything.’ ” The result was the polymathic intellectualism of the early volumes in The Frederica Quartet.

She was not notably popular with her colleagues at UCL, some of whom formed a drinking society named “Programme for the Swift Eradication of the Unspeakable Duffy”: the initials were significant. She gave up teaching with relief in 1983, to write, and engage in concomitant activities; she was chairman of the Society of Authors from 1986 to 1988, and served on the Kingman Committee on English teaching in schools.

In 1987 she published Sugar and Other Stories, her first short story collection: elegiac in tone, it dealt with loss and hope and possibility, and people’s attempts to achieve, in however small a way, a sense of personal harmony and equilibrium.

Her energy was boosted by the success of Possession in 1990 and she produced a quick succession of highly praised collections of short works: Angels and Insects (two novellas, 1992); The Matisse Stories (1994); and The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye (1995), a book of six fairy stories that allowed her to indulge her love of the fantastical. In 1998 she edited The Oxford Book of English Short Stories.

Among her later novels were The Biographer’s Tale (2000), which was widely regarded as too laborious a re-hash of the themes of Possession, and Ragnarok (2011), a retelling of Norse myths combined with a portrait of herself as a child.

Quite a few critics thought The Children’s Book (2009), which was shortlisted for the Booker and won the James Tait Black Prize, was the best novel she wrote. Set in the early years of the 20th century, it was a sprawling saga of multiple political and literary families that explored the reasons for the popularity of two phenomena of the era: Left-wing political movements and children’s fantasy literature.

It was inspired, she said, by the realisation that so many of the offspring of the great children’s writers of that time had miserable childhoods. Some commentators suggested that the grief and guilt she felt over the death of her own son gave it an extra power.

Her later works of non-fiction included two collections of essays, Passions of the Mind (1991) and On Histories and Stories (2000); Unruly Times (1989), a study of Wordsworth and Coleridge; and Peacock and Vine (2016), an illuminating comparison of two contrasting designers, Mariano Fortuny and William Morris.

AS Byatt divided her time between her house in Putney and a cottage in the Cevennes mountains in the South of France, at both of which she installed swimming pools after her Booker win. In 2003 a BBC documentary crew followed her as she summered in France, where she was shown working obsessively, stopping writing only to read, which she continued to do as she cooked and ate; her husband was forbidden from joining her in France so that she had the solitude to work. She often admitted that she found books more interesting than people.

AS Byatt was appointed CBE in 1990 and DBE in 1999. In 2003 she was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1983 and held honorary doctorates from more than a dozen universities. In 2018 she won the Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award “for her belief in the true value of fairy tales, fables, and poetry and for her historical fiction which innovatively brings the works of Andersen to life”.

Unsentimental, uncompromisingly intelligent and with limited capacity for making or enjoying jokes, she was formidable to meet, but extremely generous in the help she gave to young writers. She described herself as “anti-Christian” but retained a fondness for attending Quaker services. She loved to watch football, tennis and snooker on television.

She is survived by Peter Duffy and her three daughters.

AS Byatt, born August 24 1936, died November 16 2023