A Survey of Landmark Interviews

As is the case with several other aspects of A.S. Byatt’s career, the publication of Possession in 1990 marks a watershed in the subject matter, frequency and length of the interviews with the author; it also sees her profile raised in the national and international press beyond academic publications, where early conversations with critics appeared. Broadly, interviews before and immediately after that landmark novel centre on establishing the author’s credentials and track record as a woman writer and a contemporary, sophisticated practitioner of realism. Subsequent examples range much more widely in their (and Byatt’s) interests to include her views on science, philosophy, religion, education and current cultural trends. They serve to confirm her acknowledged status as a public intellectual in the Arnoldian mode, as is made apparent by her ‘privileging of aesthetics and devaluation of politicized criticism … within a rearticulated Arnoldian framework that clearly places the connection between the creative and the critical in contemporary discourse in a hierarchy’ (Adams 2008a: 339–40).