“A Narrative of Jealousy and Bafflement and Resentment”
By Katy Waldman| - Monday, Aug. 19, 2013, Slate
A.S. Byatt versus Margaret Drabble
Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by
Getty.
It sounds like the premise for a novel: Two brilliant sisters from Sheffield,
England pursuing their writing careers side by side. Omnipresent comparison and
competition. A feud. Veiled barbs in books. Studied indifference in interviews.
Fame favoring first one and then the other.
The women, now 76 and 74, have scaled the highest balconies of the British
literary edifice as novelists, short-story authors, critics, scholars, and
biographers. Between them, they’ve racked up more than 18 major awards, received
four royal titles, published 57 books and countless essays and articles, earned
a dozen honorary doctorates, and taken exactly one
high-profile shot at J.K. Rowling. Despite all that, the insatiable reader
still wants to know: Who’s better?
It is too early to judge the relative canon-worthiness of literary grand dames Antonia Susan (A.S.) Byatt and Margaret (Maggie) Drabble. (Plus—what an obnoxious question!) Conventional wisdom goes that Drabble, the younger sibling, shone brighter from the mid 1960s to 1990, courtesy of her two blockbuster novels, the comedy of academic manners The Millstone and the conflicted feminist fairy tale Jerusalem the Golden. (The Millstone won the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize in 1966; Jerusalem the Golden won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1967.) After 1990, Byatt took the lead. The turning point was when she scored the prestigious Man Booker Prize for her fifth novel, Possession.
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It is too early to judge the relative canon-worthiness of literary grand dames Antonia Susan (A.S.) Byatt and Margaret (Maggie) Drabble. (Plus—what an obnoxious question!) Conventional wisdom goes that Drabble, the younger sibling, shone brighter from the mid 1960s to 1990, courtesy of her two blockbuster novels, the comedy of academic manners The Millstone and the conflicted feminist fairy tale Jerusalem the Golden. (The Millstone won the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize in 1966; Jerusalem the Golden won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1967.) After 1990, Byatt took the lead. The turning point was when she scored the prestigious Man Booker Prize for her fifth novel, Possession.
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