The Shadow of the Sun : The Lady of Shalott or the Writer as Genius

Abstract

The source for this first chapter on A. S. Byatt’s The Shadow of the Sun is its 1991 reprint, an edition which is quite unique.2 It is the only novel A. S. Byatt has hitherto written a foreword for and is a fascinating text when read against the background of her critical work and the ideas she expresses about literature, authorship, gender and creative identity. The preceding chapter showed that it would be a misrepresentation of her critical work to see Byatt as somebody who is a strong advocate of feminist views on these subjects. Her work expresses too much ambivalence to warrant such a statement, though the ambivalence is also directed to Leavis-style moralism and post-structuralism. However, the foreword to her first novel is surprisingly unambivalent in its feminist analysis of the questions and problems she encountered as a female novelist in England in the 1950s. In other words, she uses the foreword to explore fully the subject about which she is so reserved in her critical work. It is one of the few texts in which A. S. Byatt discusses at length what it meant to her and to her writing that she was an ambitious woman writer in the 1950s.