Alumnae and College members celebrate the life and work of Dame A.S. Byatt

Family, friends, former colleagues and students paid tribute to Newnham’s Honorary Fellow and alumna Dame A.S. Byatt at an intimate memorial event last week, on the first anniversary of her death. 

A.S. Byatt (NC 1954) is one of Newnham’s greatest literary treasures. Her first novel, The Shadow of the Sun, was written while she was a student at Newnham, and her 1990 novel Possession won the Booker Prize.  

Alumnae, Senior and Junior Members of Newnham College gathered to celebrate her work, with the range of ages a testimony to her appeal across the generations. We were delighted to have many members of Byatt’s family with us to remember her, as friends and family read extracts of her work and talked about how her writing had influenced them as women and as readers. 

Antonia Byatt, A.S.’ daughter and a graduate of Selwyn, read from a diary of her mother's, with memories of a summer in her Newnham years.  

Professor Jenn Ashworth (NC 2000), Honorary Fellow and alumna, read from Still Life, the second in the Frederica Quartet series. Jenn said,  “Spoiled for choice, I chose to read to you about Stephanie and her family, the struggle to balance work and motherhood, because in this, and in so many other various places and spaces and types of life, Byatt shows us that she knows exactly what it felt like. 

“Not all novelists understand that domestic work and intellectual work are yes, sometimes enemies to each other... at the same time as they are vibrant threads of the same dignified life.” 

Dr Bonnie Lander Johnson, Director of Studies in English, curated the event and read from A.S. Byatt’s novel Possession, which she described as “surely the best book ever written about academic life.” She added, “This collision between the cool, calculating perception of the literary scholar and the wide, human need to be possessed by a story, is, I think, something that brings all literary scholars to places like Cambridge. It brought Byatt here, it brought me here.” 

Professor Gillian Beer, a long-time friend and colleague of A.S. and Newnham, as well as a Cambridge writer and literary critic shared her memories, read by Jenn Ashworth, of their friendship which began when they were both graduate students in Oxford, and her thoughts on three books with children at their heart. 

She wrote, “Ragnarok, A.S. Byatt's contribution to a series of short works by distinguished writers on Myths in their modern setting, first published in 2011. This short, fraught book, seen through the eyes of a young girl in wartime, goes deep into Byatt's childhood, and into mine. Long before we knew each other, we were young evacuees to the English countryside during the second world war, thrilled and appalled by the Norse legends that speak truth about violence and catastrophe, and ultimate ending. All things familiar in our fearful yet sheltered childhoods.” 

Dr Lander had asked some of her English undergraduates to choose a Byatt story and she shared their responses, before guests browsed displays of archive letters and photos of A.S. Byatt at Newnham. 

• Photo shows (L-R): Principal Alison Rose, Jenn Ashworth, Dr Bonnie Lander Johnson and Antonia Byatt