I turned up at AS Byatt’s Putney home just before lunchtime. I was due to interview her; a journalist doesn’t expect any particular hospitality in these circumstances. Perhaps I hoped for a cup of tea. But Byatt, a warm and serious presence, insisted I take a glass of Champagne. “Champagne is good for you,” she said – advice I’ve lived by ever since.
In 2008, when I was literary editor of the Times, we published a list of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945. Byatt, who died on 16 November aged 87, came in at number 34, between Anita Brookner and Ian McEwan. Such a list would look very different now, but I stand by her inclusion in that august company and few, I think, would argue. Her work was distinguished by a remarkable combination of deep seriousness and a real playfulness which found its first full flowering in her bestselling, Booker Prize-winning 1990 novel Possession, a “romance”, as she called it, which nested two narratives and two time periods together to build a love affair and a mystery, all at once – shot through with her own simulacrum of Victorian poetry, a delight in itself.
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