https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3616386.html

Stories from early in Byatt's career; I have previously read Possession, which I loved, and Babel Tower, which I did not. Two of these are ghost stories, most of them demonstrate a talent still coming together. I particularly liked the first one, “Racine and the Tablecloth”, about feminist liberation through boarding-school essays, and the last two, “Precipice-Encurled”, an exploration of Robert Browning à la Possession, and the clearly autobiographical “Sugar”. All very digestible. ( )

Byatt's first published collection of short stories, which appeared in between the novels Still life and Possession, contains eleven stories, mostly written for The New Yorker or Encounter. The subjects advance in a suspiciously logical sequence through the book: women's education, mother-daughter relationships, ghosts, accusations of witchcraft, writers and mortality. The opening story, "Racine and the Tablecloth", has a younger version of Frederica (called Emily here) at boarding school in York and locked in a struggle with a small-minded headmistress who thinks academic achievement is no excuse for refusing to engage with the community life of the school, in a kind of inverted Miss Jean Brodie set-up.

"Precipice-encurled" is particularly interesting in the light of what is to come in that it's historical fiction about Robert Browning — we meet him and his sister in Venice a couple of years after Elizabeth's death, planning a visit to friends in their holiday retreat in the Apennines, and sketching out a poem about Descartes.

The autobiographical title-story also ties a lot of threads together: the narrator talks about her memories of her (paternal) grandparents, who ran a sweet factory in Conisbrough, and reflects on how much creative fiction goes into family memories: her firsthand memories are conditioned by the way her mother "improved" the facts to turn them into family anecdotes, and she herself adds her professional writer's instinct to turn events into stories. She also talks about her father's death and his passion for Van Gogh (tying into Still Life, of course) and about her passion for Norse mythology and Ragnarök, which she traces back to a book her mother had used "as a crib" whilst doing compulsory Old Norse and Icelandic for her English degree, and which she read as a young child. And that, of course, links into several of her later novels, including Possession. ( )

Themes seem to run from story to story. The first two are both about differences between generations (women's); 2-4 about death and survival, and attitude to ancestors, which links with former generations in 1; No 5, `The dried witch', ends with her death and survival. Also theme of woman ageing, which carries on through 7, 9, 10 (Juliana). Then 6 and 7 are about literature and language. The heroine of 6 is a lecturer in lit; of 7 is a writer, with treatment again of the theme of death. The heroine of 8 is another woman writer, now introducing the theme of fear - or carrying it on from the end of previous story. Fear (woman's) is main theme of next story, 9. Sudden death, literature (and art), and one generation investigating an earlier one, in 10.
Then the last one, 11, which gives the collection its title, and from which
the cover pictures derive. It chiefly reverts to theme of family history, inter-generational relations, development. ( )

À.S. Byatt est une auteure remarquable par la richesse, la subtilité et la pertinence de son écriture. Un académisme un peu trop marqué entache ici et là la force du texte dans certaines nouvelles (notamment dans Loss of face) mais on pardonne aisément une nouvelliste aussi douée.
Les émotions souvent violentes qui affleurent sous les mots d'une grande précision et d'une belle élégance sont particulièrement bien restituées, au fil de nouvelles très diversifiées. ( )

sette racconti bellissimi, in cui le storie fanno da padrone e le parole sono evocative. ( )