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Seeking the Light: A. S. Byatt's The Shadow of the Sun

© Pamela St. Clair

A(ntonia) S(usan) Byatt’s 1990 bestseller, Possession, which won the Booker Prize that same year, established her literary reputation in America. She is the sister of Margaret Drabble, an equally successful novelist. Although much has been written about Byatt's recent fiction (Possession, Babel Tower, and the short story collections The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye, Sugar and Other Stories, The Matisse Stories, and Elementals), her earlier fiction has received less attention, yet it is no less deserving.

The Shadow of the Sun, Byatt’s first novel published in 1964, will disappoint Possession fans looking for a similar tale of mystery and romance. However, those accustom to Byatt’s intricate language, rich in allusion, metaphor and color, will appreciate, as I did, watching the young novelist exercising her linguistic skills while adeptly weaving together the story of a young woman’s bildungsroman. Anna Severell struggles to find her own creative vision and voice under the influence of her renowned father, Henry Severell, genius and Coleridge scholar. Critics have suggested that through Anna and her father, Byatt was simply writing an account of her relationship with her own father. In her 1991 introduction to the novel, however, Byatt refutes such a simple reading: “Henry Severell has little or nothing to do with my father...Henry Severell is partly simply my secret self” (ix).

This is not to say that there are no autobiographical elements in the novel, for they crop up in such places as the landscape, the English countryside which mirrors Sheffield, Lincolnshire where Byatt grew up, and in Henry’s fascination with Coleridge, whom Byatt, as critic and scholar, has also written extensively about. If Henry is not a portrait of Byatt’s father, his wife Caroline is a refraction, rather than a reflection, of Byatt’s mother, who, as Kathleen Coyne Kelly reports, continually resented having to forego a career to be a housewife and mother (2). In The Shadow of the Sun, Byatt depicts Caroline as her own mother’s negative, as a wife who not only accepts but also relishes playing Henry’s protectress, shielding him from family (including Anna), friends and any social obligations that might intrude upon his work. Caroline never articulates any desire to indulge in her own pursuits outside of the domestic sphere she manages.

Anna is most like her father with her intense visions and her solitary sojourns, yet she struggles to forge her own identity not only against his insurmountable reputation but also against the female models available to her. In addition to her acquiescent mother, Anna observes, often with distaste, Margaret Canning, the wife of the young critic Oliver Canning. The Cannings spend a summer vacation with the Severells. Margaret pines over and is submissive to Oliver. Sensing, in part, Margaret’s desperateness, Anna shirks away from her and from Margaret’s overtures to “help” Anna by buying her clothing more “appropriate” for a young woman than the slouchy jeans and shirts Anna prefers. Indeed Margaret’s own clothing bespeaks the Barbie doll image she projects of herself. On an outing to the beach, where rough terrain must be climbed over to reach the beach, Margaret is ridiculously outfitted in “a cotton sundress, rose and white striped with a full skirt and petticoats” (102). Anna values neither the domesticity of her mother’s realm nor the plastic surface of Margaret’s.

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