With the publication of her prizewinning fifth novel, Possession: A Romance (1990), A. S. Byatt expanded her audience from a previously small but dedicated one in Britain to a wide, enthusiastic readership on both sides of the Atlantic. A respected critic, reviewer, editor, and scholar as well as writer of fiction, Byatt has often been praised for her prodigious intellect, her erudition, and her talent for creating long, complex novels; in addition, she has demonstrated her ability to tell a good story.

Antonia Susan Drabble was born on 24 August 1936 in the sooty steel town of Sheffield, Yorkshire, the eldest of the four children of Kathleen Marie Bloor Drabble and John Frederick Drabble. Her father was a barrister and later a judge; her mother was a former elementary schoolteacher, neurotic and frustrated, angrily unhappy at being a full-time housewife. Both came from working-class families but had studied at Cambridge, and...