ABSTRACT
Antonia. Susan. Byatt was born in Yorkshire in 1936 and went to school in York before reading English at Cambridge. Although she is approaching her seventies and has been publishing fiction since the 1960s, Antonia Byatt has only reached the wider audience she always deserved in the past fifteen years and her best works belong to the 1990s. The 1990s proved to be A.S.Byatt's most creative decade and, since the publication of Possession, she has produced three more major novels and several volumes of shorter fiction. A Whistling Woman, the book which brings Byatt's epic work of fictional historiography to a conclusion, is set as the 1960s begin to founder and many of its characters are those of dreamers and radicals caught in the shipwreck of its hopes and ideals.
