‘I know I can do anything’: new archive of AS Byatt’s papers looks inside the writer’s extraordinary mind — SkimNews
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- British Library acquired 68 boxes of A.S. Byatt's notebooks, letters and diaries, with the archive illuminating how she assembled the raw material of her fiction
- A.S. Byatt won the Booker Prize for her novel Possession and was known for voracious research
- The papers capture Byatt's early self-doubt — at age 20, Antonia Susan Byatt questioned whether she could take herself seriously as a writer
- Byatt's later confidence is captured in the headline quote: "I know I can do anything"
- The archive reframes the trajectory of a writer who went from uncertain 20-year-old to one of Britain's most celebrated novelists
Why it matters: Scholars and devoted readers of Byatt now have direct access to the primary research behind novels like Possession, while the archive also revises the origin story of an author who at 20 could not yet take herself seriously as a writer before becoming a Booker winner.
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