On Histories and Stories

Selected Essays

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by A. S. Byatt

Harvard University Press

Due/Published March 2001, 208 pages, cloth

ISBN 0674004515

Salman Rushdie says that English fiction had been moribund until the Empire wrote back, and few, even among the British, demur. Among those that do, count A. S. Byatt does. In a series of essays on the complicated relations between reading, writing, and remembering, this novelist and critic seeks to arrive at a new view of British writing in our time. 

Whether writing about the renaissance of the historical novel, discussing her own translation of historical fact into fiction, or exploring the recent European revival of interest in myth, folklore, and fairytale, Byatt's abiding concern here is with the interplay of fiction and history. Her essays amount to a meditation on the commitment to historical narrative and storytelling that she shares with many of her British and European contemporaries. With insights into writers from Elizabeth Bowen and Henry Green to Anthony Burgess, William Golding, Muriel Spark, Penelope Fitzgerald, Julian Barnes, Martin Amis, Hilary Mantel, and Pat Barker, On Histories and Stories is an oblique defense of the art Byatt practices and a map of the complex affiliations of British and European narrative since 1945.