The novelist AS Byatt, who has died aged 87, was throughout her existence a victim of Samuel Johnson's hunger of the imagination that preys incessantly upon life, and must be always appeased by some employment.
In the words of one of her own heroines, whatever in the moral abstract she thought about the relative importance of writing and life, nothing mattered to her more than writing.
To some extent the creation of fiction had become necessary to her as a complement (or antidote) to her teaching work at University College London, as a kind of private gesture against an excessively theoretical academic environment.
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