Dame Antonia Susan Duffy, known as A. S. Byatt was born on 24 August 1936.

She is an English
novelist, poet and Booker Prize winner. In 2008, The Times newspaper named her on its list of the 50
greatest British writers since 1945.
A.S. Byatt has also contributed to debates at HowTheLightGetsIn, the world's largest philosophy and
music festival hosted by the Institute of Art and Ideas.
Since publishing her bestselling, prizewinning novel Possession, A.S. Byatt has stepped, to establish
her own presence in the British literary world.

Author Statement:
'I write novels because I am passionately interested in language. Novels are works of art
which are made out of language, and are made in solitude by one person and read in
solitude by one person - by many different, single people, it is to be hoped. So I am also
interested in what goes on in the minds of readers, and writers, and characters and
narrators in books. I like to write about people who think, to whom thinking is as important
and exciting (and painful) as sex or eating. This doesn't mean I want my books to be cerebral
or simply battles of ideas. I love formal patterning in novels - I like to discover and make
connections between all sorts of different people, things, ways of looking, points in time and
space. But I also like the idea that novels can be, as James said, 'loose baggy monsters', a
generous form that can take account of almost anything. Temperamentally, and morally, I
like novels with large numbers of people and centres of consciousness, not novels that adopt
a narrow single point-of-view, author's or character's. I don't like novels that preach or
proselytise. (I fear people with very violent beliefs, though I admire people with thought-out
principles.) The novel is an agnostic form - it explores and describes; the novelist and the
reader learn more about the world along the length of the book.'


Angels and Insects (1992)
The next book that came out after the great novel Possession is Angels and Insects which is two
novellas published as one book. They are peripherally connected to one another one character
overlaps with both stories (a very peripheral character) and yet the themes are similar. Morpho
Eugenia is the first novella in Angels and Insects and it is that story that was turned into a movie
called Angels and Insects. One of the stories is the insect story, while the other one is the angels
story. Morpho Eugenia is the insect story.
My opinion about this novel is that its a feast for the mind and spirit.
Morpho Eugenia is the first story. The story is relatively simple although layers of complexity are
added until you feel kind of like William himself buried in innuendoes, lies, and half-truths. You dont
know what is going on. It takes place in 1860. William Adamson, the main character is a naturalist,
who has spent years in the Amazon, living with the indigenous people, and studying flora, fauna, but
mainly insects. Here we can see that Byatt returns again and again in all of her books to the
fascination 19th century people had for insects. It was nearly a mania. Randolph Henry Ash in
Possession has the same fascination. And some of Christabels letters and poems in Possession have
to do with various insects as metaphors.
William Adamson has spent years outside of normal British society. On his return home to England,
his ship sank and he was rescued, and managed to save his once-in-a-lifetime only specimen
collection of tropical butterflies. In comes Harald Alabaster a rich men who lives on a self-sustaining
estate with his wife, many children, and many servants. He is interested in Adamsons work so he
basically invites him to come stay on his estate, as the resident naturalist. Bring his specimens. A
conservatory is set up where the butterflies can fly free and a laboratory is set up for Adamson to
do his work in peace and quiet. Adamson very quickly kind of falls in love with Eugenia one of the
Harald Alabasters daughters. At the same time, he begins to work with Matty Crompton, a
spinster(celibatara), who is the younger childrens governess.
( Matty Crompton, a woman whose position would never allow her the freedom of Adamson (her
position in her class, her sex, her education) so she asks Adamson if he woudlnt mind helping her
teach the children, and go on nature walks with them to pass on some of his knowledge about
insects.)
Something is deeply deeply wrong in the Alabaster household and it takes William a long long time
to figure it out. He is in an awkward position because he is indebted to Alabaster and once he
marries Eugenia he almost becomes enslaved to him. He begins to lose his purpose in life. Eugenia
doesnt understand any of his issues. She is most definitely Daddys little girl. So William tries to lose
himself more and more in his work only he doesnt know anymore what his work is FOR. He feels
trapped on the Alabaster estate.
Matty Crompton, meanwhile, has this intense (one might say fiery) interest in ants, ant societies and
communities, so they set up observation posts to watch the ants do their thing. Here we can see the
multiple levels of narrative.
Crompton keeps notes on what she observes. Instead of Byatt describing the notes to us as an
omniscent narrator we get to read the notes themselves. We get to read Williams personal
journal. Matty has actually written a fanciful and violent fairy tale she asks William to read it and
give her comments. We get to read the whole thing. You go deeper and deeper into the intellectual
pursuits of these two characters you lose sight of the Alabaster estate altogether (which is what
these two experience when they lie in the grass, watching the ants), and when you come back up for
air, after 20 pages of his journals or whatever and you are back to reality its quite discordant.
William has chosen his own prison but he didnt realize at the time what a prison it would be.
Matty Crompton, the spinster governess, sees all. And yet until the electrifying scene at the end
you never know what it is that she sees.
Its a brilliant novella full of ideas, and passion, and long conversations about Darwin and God and
Milton and also a couple of plot-shockers
In The Conjugal Angel we enter a spirit world. For the inhabitants of the world, the spirit reality is as
tangible, as rational a universe as any other. It is a world with familiar landmarks that reveal
themselves easily to the accepting mind. Powerfully and engagingly interpreted by an influential
writer, their significance enters the participants' assumptions, their existence never questioned.

In these breathtaking novellas, A.S. Byatt returns to the territory she explored in Possession: the
landscape of Victorian England, where science and spiritualism are both popular manias, and
domestic decorum coexists with brutality and perversion. Angels and Insects is "delicate and
confidently ironic.... Byatt perfectly blends laughter and sympathy [with] extraordinary sensuality".
Angels and Insects is set in the mid-nineteenth century and, as such, deals with concepts, both social
and intellectual, which are quite foreign, quite removed from those of the contemporary reader. In
Morpho Eugenia, we have a scientist exploring the revolutionary ideas of evolution and applying
these not only to the natural world he researches, but also the private human world, both physical
and emotional, that he inhabits. Needless to say, his radical ideas are not shared by many close to
him. In The Conjugal Angel, we encounter a group of people motivated by a reality they all share.
But, for the contemporary reader, it is a reality that is utterly foreign, its literature and its analysis
both apparently bogus in todays judgment.
Thus, eventually Angels and Insects is a novel about ideology. It illustrates how ideological
assumptions about the nature of existence can drive an individual's and a society's approach to life,
and how it can convince people of the truth of illusion, or vice versa. And in considering the works of
contemporary poets, Angels and Insects illustrate how the literature of an age can become suffused
with its ideology and, indeed, how this can feed back into the substance of life to reinforce
assumptions.
As ever, Byatts use of language is virtuosic, making the process of reading Angels and Insects a
delight throughout. It is an ambitious project which almost achieves its design. The shortfall,
however, becomes a frustration.












Social concens:
The two novellas are set in Victorian England. One of the unifying elements in the work is Alfred,
Lord Tennyson's lengthy, celebrated poem In Memoriam, quoted in both novellas and important to
the plot of the second. Published in 1850 and immensely popular, the poem addressed numerous
Victorian concerns in the process of dealing with the poet's grief over his friend's death. One of the
most important of those concerns for the Victorians and in these novellas is the impact of the work
of Charles Darwin and other scientists. The nature of human life, the existence of God, and the
possibility of an afterlife were called into question; "Morpho Eugenia" is more concerned with the
relationship of "civilized" human society to primitive and animal societies while "The Conjugial
Angel" deals with the relationship of the physical and spiritual worlds.
Byatt, who had previously used the fiction forms of the novel and the short story, here shows
considerable skill with the third form, the novella. She relates the two novellas to each other by
setting and social concerns, but each is capable of standing on its own.Readers who find some of her
novels difficult because of their length or density will find these shorter works more accessible. As
she does in many of her other works, works-within-works appear in each novella. In "Morpho
Eugenia," Matty Crompton's short story "Things Are Not What They Seem" is included in its entirety
along with parts of nonfiction works by William and his father-in-law. In "The Conjugial Angel," Byatt
includes illustrations by Victorian artists and quotations from Victorian poems; even her spirits speak
in poetry during the seances.
Summary:
The two novellas explore the place of humans in the universe; they are somewhere, as the title
suggests, between angels and insects and are part of both the physical and spiritual worlds. In
"Morpho Eugenia," the society created by humans to distinguish them from what they view as lower
life forms proves to be a thin veneer covering behavior very much like, and in some cases perhaps
worse than, that of primitive humans and of animals. Tennyson's view of nature as "red in tooth and
claw," quoted in the novella, has replaced the rosier Romantic ideal. In "The Conjugial Angel," an
uneasy relationship between the living and the dead develops. Byatt suggests that excessive concern
with the afterlife, especially if caused by grief for a lost loved one, is not only detrimental to the
living person but to the dead as well.








In a New York Times review, Wendy Lesser comments on the structure of Angels & Insects,
suggesting that Byatt linked these otherwise separate entities *the two novellas] with a tenuous
ligament at the midsection, rather as in the construction of an ants body. I love any discussion of
formalism and the two novellas do seem to be legitimately, ingenuously linked. Technically, they are
linked by a minor character from Morpho Eugenia, mentioned briefly at the close of the story. As
William and Matty sail off into the Amazonian sunset, readers are told that they board a ship
captained by Arturo Papagay. In the second novella, The Conjugial Angel, readers are introduced to a
Lilias Papagay, a medium who is on her way to extend her services at sance conducted at a
Victorian home. Readers learn that Arturo Papagay disappeared, along with his ship and crew, at sea
and Lilias has long considered him dead. Through the reference of a seemingly random character,
readers are transported to the next narrative and flipped inside-out, so to speak, into a crucial,
completely different perspective. Lilias has constructed her widowhood around helping other
people (for pay) connect with their lost ones, a phenomenon grown increasingly popular, Lilias
theorizes, from the crisis of religion in, again, a post-Darwinian era. So this is the idea that the
tenuous ligament connects, the human fear that the human soul is not eternal or particularly
exceptional.
Reading this novella, I was especially interested in the idea of the sance itself (Byatt herself must
have an unusual interest in sances; her other novel on my list, Possession, has an important scene
that takes place at a sance). Sances, a very un-Victorian activity, nevertheless grew in popularity in
England in the mid-nineteenth century, in conjunction with the rise of Spiritualism. Besides longing
to speak to departed love-ones, some of the participants in The Conjugial Angel are well-versed in
Spiritualism, particularly in seventeenth-century Swedish spiritualist Emanuel Swedenborg (the
weird spelling of conjugal in the title of the novella is an allusion to his writings), suggesting that
their interest in these gatherings goes beyond mere solace (there is a great theoretical discussion on
how seeing beyond might merely be a matter of training ones eyes and mind to see certain
concepts). However, it is Lilass particular connection to the sance that is most intriguing. As a
widow, Lilias understands her options in life: she can either remarry (which she is mostly opposed to
out of loyalty to her first husband) or she can live the quiet, sheltered life of a Victorian widow.
Instead, she uses her powers as a paid medium (I love how the text is ambiguous to whether Lilas
has legitimate powers or not, what she does during the sance is some combination of her
imagination, desire to tell stories, and her unique way of seeing people) in order to both support
herself and live a heightened existence. In her role as a medium, she is not only able to interact with
people of all different social ranks but she is able to see these people at their most desperate and
most fiercely alive, their secret selves, their deepest desires and fears, thus avoiding a lifetime of
gossip of bonnets, and embroidery and the eternal servant problem.
The true narrative of the novella concerns Emily Jesse, a participant in the sance and an actual
historical figure. Emily Tennyson Jesse is the sister of the Poet Laureate of England and Ireland in the
Victorian era, Alfred Lord Tennyson (The Charge of the Light Brigade, Idylls of the King, In
Memoriam A.H.H.). In reality and in the narrative, Emily Tennyson, in her youth, was engaged to
Alfreds best friend from Cambridge, Arthur Hallam. Arthur Hallam died shortly after they were
engaged which caused both Tennyson siblings great despair. Alfred, however, wins the prize in the
art of grieving, writing his canonical work, In Memoriam A.H.H, making Arthur Hallam, as the
narrative irreverently declares, the most famous dead person in England. Not only did Tennyson
immortalize his friend in poetry, but he immortalized their now-famous friendship as well. History
remembers Alfreds pain at the loss of his friend, not Emilys pain at the loss of her fianc. In The
Conjugial Angel, Byatt imagines Emilys later life, years after she, like Lilas Papagay, chooses what
path to take in the wake of a dead lover.
Emily, as readers see, made the choice to remarry. This choice is met with judgement and anger
from those close to the Tennyson and Hallam family (it is mentioned that Elizabeth Barrett, pre-
Browning, was a particularly vocal critic), questioning the nature of love in a indisputably mortal
universe. Participants in the sance consider the nature of love, specifically what Swedenborg means
when he discusses conjugial love, or the love found when one finds their perfect other half, one
that we should seek ceaselessly. Lilias and Emily reflect on the men they once considered to be
their perfect halves (one relationship consummated, the other tragically cut short) and find no clear
answer. Lilias (still exclusively referred to as Mrs. Papagay) remembers a relationship of pleasure and
mostly craves the physical benefits of having a husband. Emily knew her fianc only in his most
beautiful, confident Cambridge years and will never be acquainted with the more fully-formed
person he was preventing from becoming. This idea of a perfect, angelic love is undermined by the
severed spheres of the living and dead, as well as the unavoidable realities of time, memory,
psychological development, and physical comfort that the exalted dead are spared. The best parts of
the novella, for me, are in these moments when the mortal reach out, against logic and traditional
religious doctrine, in the hopes of briefly merging with the thoughts, hopes, and fears of the
immortal in order to find answers about their present existence.















A S BYATT has a high mind and a heavy hand. Both are in evidence again in Angels and Insects (her
new diptych of novellas set in the Victorian era), along with a virtue that the high-minded don't
always possess: a generous freedom from small-mindedness. In her critical essays, she has
characterised herself as 'a greedy reader', and detractors would say that a weakness of Byatt the
novelist is her habit of copiously regurgitating over her fiction the product of these print-binges.
It's true that until she hit on the ludic, postmodern manner of Possession, her creative work seemed,
at times, merely the continuation of criticism by other means. And in the light of this, it's a safe bet
that most reviewers will prefer the first novella, 'Morpho Eugenia', to its companion piece 'The
Conjugial Angel'. Focusing on a young explorer and insect-collector who comes to see dismaying
parallels between ant society and the social system in which he himself is ambiguously embroiled at
the home of his father-in-law and patron, the former story certainly has the stronger narrative
impulse. Though it resolutely crams in mounds of mugged-up entomology, there's a gaudy panache
and sly Gothic tricksiness to the way the fable dramatises Victorian anxieties about competition
versus co-operation and the place of man in a Godless universe.
By comparison, 'The Conjugial Angel', which takes up similar concerns in the slightly seedy
spiritualist world of Victorian mediums and their bereft clients, makes slow progress, impeded by
hefty road-blocks of arcane, unassimilated Swedenborg. But its treatment of Tennyson's In
Memoriam contains much the most compelling and moving writing in the volume: like the
discussions of Hamlet, say, in Ulysses or the scattered insights into Madame Bovary in Flaubert's
Parrot, its meditations derives their power from the fact that they occur in a fictional discourse.
The novella takes off from a biographical anecdote told about Emily Tennyson Jesse, the Laureate's
sister. In youth, she lost her fiance, Arthur Hallam, the subject of Tennyson's great elegy. Towards
the end of her life, it's said, she attended a seance with her husband, a 'lubberly lieutenant', where
she was informed that in the afterlife she would join Arthur Hallam on an eternal basis. 'I consider
that an extremely unfair arrangement,' she is reported to have replied indignantly, pledging to stick
by the man with whom she lived this life. Byatt envisions Emily's conflicting responses to her
brother's poem: the tact (or was it reproach?) with which he usurped her place as Hallam's 'widow';
the implied rebuke of his ending the elegy not with her own inconvenient nuptials but with the less
touchy wedding of their sister, Cecilia, and so on. As well as offering a bracing, felt perspective on
the poem, Emily's imagined thoughts give us an intricate understanding of the position of a
bereaved Victorian woman, trapped by the disapproval of others, her love upstaged by male
friendships.
Some reservations: in 'Morpho Eugenia' a character, writing in 1863, asks her readers to imagine a
hard red apple as the Albert Hall; this would be a clairvoyant feat of comparison since work on that
building did not begin till four years later. More important than such niggles, though, are the doubts
about style. Byatt's writing is irritatingly littered with the 'a kind of (or sort of) x y' descriptive pattern
('a kind of accomplished town-flirtatiousness'; 'a kind of deadly defiance') that Christopher Ricks has
rightly identified as weakening the prose of her great mentor, Iris Murdoch. It's a formula that
mimes scrupulousness while actually being vague and bet-hedging and it reaches its comic nadir
here when a character in 'The Conjugial Angel' fantasises about how an acquaintance makes
bedroom advances on his wife: 'he would have a sort of little sign that that was what he wanted'.
Precisely what sort of a sort of little sign would that be, one wonders?