The impression given by her houses is confirmed by her conversation, which moves confidently between literature, biology, the fine arts, and theoretical preoccupations and displays a mind turned always outwards.
If English writing has stopped being a matter of small relationships and delicate social blunders, and has turned its attention to the larger questions of history, art, and the life of ideas, it is largely due to the generous example of Byatt's wide-ranging ambition.
Her novels are Shadow of a Sun (1964), reprinted under the originally intended title The Shadow of the Sun in 1991, The Game (1967), Possession: A Romance (1990), which was a popular winner of the Booker Prize, and The Biographer's Tale (2000).