The children s book by as byatt as byatt s charged account of the perils of artistic creation chills alex clark. But more than that, byatt s book is an astute moral lesson. The children s book is a historical panorama that encompasses many political and social movements of the early twentieth century. Loosely based upon the life of children s writer e. Byatt was born in sheffield as antonia susan drabble, the eldest child of john drabble, qc, and kathleen bloor, a scholar of browning. Full text of lincolnshire pedigrees internet archive. We recognize byatt as masterful even as she begins, for in the first chapter one feels the power of her rich. It follows the adventures of several interrelated families, adults and children, from 1895 through world war i.
Nesbit there are secrets slowly revealed that show that the families are much more creatively formed than first guessed. In a profound sense, this novel is indeed the children s book. As a result of the bombing of sheffield during the second world war the family moved to york. Ive read several of her novels, but the childrens book is my favourite for the way it vividly evokes bohemian life at the turn of the 20th century in england. Her books include possession, and the quartet of the virgin in the garden, still life, babel tower and a whistling woman. Were you familiar with the figures and movements byatt discusses. From the renowned author of possession, the childrens book is the absorbing story of the close of what has been called the edwardian summer. So wellresearched that the childrens book could well have been a consummate history of the edwardian era. Byatt summons up a whole era, revealing that beneath its golden surface lay tensions that would explode into war. Byatt is internationally acclaimed as a novelist, short storywriter and critic. Byatt is a little like opening a longabandoned toy cupboard and finding childhood thoughts and feelings inside, tattered and worn and wellremembered, rather than the playthings one might have expected.
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