Selected Essays. I think I would have gotten a lot more out of these
essays if I had read even a fraction of the books that Byatt chooses
to discuss. Her words are always a delight to read, however,
especially when she is discussing literature and history. The first
trio of essays deals with historical fiction, particularly British
historical fiction, which ties in nicely with the later essays where
she talks about her own process when writing fiction. "As a writer I
know very well that a text is all the words that are in it, and not
only those words, but the other words that precede it, haunt it, and
are echoed in it..." As always, I found a lot to think about in her
takes on classic fairy tales, especially when she discusses how the
stories she loved as a girl affected the woman she became. She also
spends a good bit of time on the Thousand and One Nights, which
I'm pretty sure is going to be my next pillow book as soon as I finish
rereading Possession. Not unsurprisingly, the parts of these
essays I lapped up most eagerly were the insights she offered into
Possession: "I wrote a chapter called 'The Threshold' in which
a wandering Childe meets three fairies, gold, silver and leaden, who
offer him power, sex, and mystery. I wrote it in the arch Victorian
narrative voice of my Victorian heroine, who would rather that he had
chosen the golden lady, but knew he must follow the leaden one under
the arch of the standing stones into fairyland or the underworld." I
have always identified so strongly with the last woman, perhaps
because I fear what it means to be one of the first two. "The story
in Possession is told by Christabel LaMotte, woman and artist,
who is deeply afraid that any ordinary human happiness may be
purchased at the expense of her art, that maybe she needs to be alone
in her golden hair on her glass eminence, an ice-maiden."
|
Heidi J. De Vries
