Obituary of AS Byatt: Ingenious, cerebral and forthright novelist who won the Booker Prize for ‘Possession’

AS Byatt, above, was a sister of the novelist Margaret Drabble

©Telegraph.co.uk

Antonia Duffy, the novelist AS Byatt, who has died aged 87, was once described as the most consciously intellectual female writer since George Eliot; her dense, cerebral fiction looked set never to command a large public until in 1990 her novel Possession won the Booker Prize and transformed her into an international literary celebrity.

In her first quarter-century as a novelist she rarely sought to inspire “narrative greed” — the term she coined for a reader’s feverish compulsion to turn the pages. But with Possession, which became a worldwide bestseller, she allowed herself for the first time to deploy what she had learned from her beloved Georgette Heyer as well as her usual role models, Proust and DH Lawrence.