Byatt is certainly familiar with and clever at handling these newer critical approaches, as the more academic stretches of Possessions demonstrate. However, she remains committed to the idea that literature has a moral dimension, and that language can in fact get abstract truths and felt experience. As she says of her days at Cambridge, she learned that writing “was taught, in order to make the world better, more just, more discriminating.” Reflecting back on her experience at “Leavis Cambridge”, as Byatt refers to it, she is able to respect and admire the moral seriousness with which Leavis attempted to place ‘English Literature at the center of university studies and also of social morality.”
Though, Byatt utters now that “I felt then that these claims were extravagant and absurdly exclusive.” She continues to believe in the power and beauty of language, and in literature as having a moral depth and compass. She speaks of Leavis’s great “moral ferocity which dismissed all literature but the greatest, which was great for moral reasons. He could show you the toughness of a sentence, the strength and the grace of it, the way another one failed and betrayed itself, but you paid a terribleprice for this useful technical knowledge.”
Her 1991 introduction to the reissue of The Shadow of the Sun is an exercise in reflective in which she …show more content…
She says, “I think what saved me was the students” . She began to complete her book, The Virgin in the Garden which was interrupted after the death of her son. It was published in 1978. It is the first of a series of four novels that represents the life of the Potter family. A minor character is Mrs. Thone, who is devastated by her son’s death. Guilt and grief are explored in brief here and would carry on to be touched upon in Byatt’s later work. Yet, it must be said that in these works Byatt is doing more than simply reworking the mess of autobiography into
Though, Byatt utters now that “I felt then that these claims were extravagant and absurdly exclusive.” She continues to believe in the power and beauty of language, and in literature as having a moral depth and compass. She speaks of Leavis’s great “moral ferocity which dismissed all literature but the greatest, which was great for moral reasons. He could show you the toughness of a sentence, the strength and the grace of it, the way another one failed and betrayed itself, but you paid a terribleprice for this useful technical knowledge.”
Her 1991 introduction to the reissue of The Shadow of the Sun is an exercise in reflective in which she …show more content…
She says, “I think what saved me was the students” . She began to complete her book, The Virgin in the Garden which was interrupted after the death of her son. It was published in 1978. It is the first of a series of four novels that represents the life of the Potter family. A minor character is Mrs. Thone, who is devastated by her son’s death. Guilt and grief are explored in brief here and would carry on to be touched upon in Byatt’s later work. Yet, it must be said that in these works Byatt is doing more than simply reworking the mess of autobiography into