I just discovered A.S. Byatt’s author site through So Many Books.

The site appears to be still under construction but makes some essays (mostly introductions) by Byatt available online. Here is a piece from an essay on the writing of Possession, a favorite novel of mine:

There is one further late choice I should like to mention. There are three passages in the nineteenth-century narrative which are recounted by a Victorian “omniscient” third-person narrator. These three include the Epilogue, and tell what might be thought of as the most important, beautiful and terrible moments in the lives of the Victorian characters. I still receive angry letters from time to time from all over the world, saying these passages are a mistake- that I have cleverly told the story of the past through documents, diaries, letters, poems, and am breaking my own convention incompetently. But my decision was very deliberate. It was partly polemical, for two reasons. I do believe that biographies are a kind of shadow-play, and that what really mattered is likely to elude the piecers-together of lives. (Doris Lessing endorses this view, mischievously, at the beginning of her recent autobiography.) I also believe that the third-person narrator has been much maligned in the recent past – it does not aspire or pretend to be “God”- simply the narrative voice, which knows what it does know. And I wanted to show that such a voice can bring the reader nearer the passions and the thoughts of the characters, without any obligation to admire the cleverness of the novelist. There is a nice irony about this- the writer and reader share what the critics and scholars cannot discover.