AS Byatt and the Heliotropic Imagination

Naomi Brun is a freelance writer and a book reviewer for The Hamilton
Spectator.

A.S. Byatt is the author of many highly acclaimed works of fiction,
including The Virgin in the Garden and Possession. Although easily
categorized as a literary novelist for her elegant language and complex
structures, Byatt generally falls outside the spectrum of other
classifications simply because she refuses to limit her writing to the
confines of any one stylistic framework. Consequently, she has been
considered difficult to analyze, and many scholars have preferred to
focus on her individual works rather than on Byatt herselfas a writer.

In A.S. Byatt and the Heliotropic Imagination, Jane Campbell of Wilfrid
Laurier University presents a well-researched and even-handed portrait
of Byatt as a literary figure. Campbell explains Byatt’s underlying
philosophies quite clearly in her introduction, giving the reader a
solid foundation before proceeding through the rest of the book. In
brief summation, Byatt has described her own work as heliotropic,
“turning to the sun of creativity … she explores and develops her
own relation to the sun, and she shows her women characters experiencing
adventures of the mind and feelings that bring them into the sun’s
light.” She also embraces the both/and position with respect to
feminism and tradition versus postmodernism; that is, she creates
feminist characters in a society that is not exclusively feminist, and
finds herself able to incorporate traditional and postmodernist literary
techniques into her writing. As a result, Byatt’s writing is typically
multifaceted, replete with metaphor, and filled with an incomparable
richness.

After the first two introductory chapters, Campbell proceeds to analyze
eight works in order of publication. Her own insights are both inspired
and solidly defended, and when she draws on the ideas of other critics,
she has been careful to avoid the ideas of scholars who bend Byatt’s
work to their own perspectives.

A.S. Byatt and the Heliotropic Imagination is an outstanding study of
one of the literary greats of our time.