ABSTRACT
Byatt, the British author of 11 novels, five short-story collections, and seven volumes of critical essays and biographies, is preoccupied with the themes of death, grief, and science, as well as questions concerning the relationship between art and reality. Stone Woman condenses the sensations of illness, aging, and grief into the image of turning to stone and demonstrates that death is a concept relative to the culture in question. Stone Woman enriches debates about grief, aging, and death by foregrounding individual experience over biomedical conceptualizations of the body. Stories explores grief and death using a distinctive hybrid of realism and metafiction that problematizes clear distinctions between illusion and reality. The ways in which individuals encounter, interpret, and respond to grief suggest that to paraphrase Norman Cousins death is not the greatest loss in life; the greatest loss is what dies inside the reader while the people live.
