A. S. Byatt is a Newnham alumna; there aren’t many corners of the college in which I haven’t read her work. One night, killing time in a friend’s room while he finished his work, I remember casually picking up Byatt’s introduction to ‘Memory: An Anthology’, and being moved almost to tears by her description of remembering her grandmother remembering her girlhood. Like all of Byatt’s prose, it made words into something exceptionally physical, a seamless translation of matter into memory; the novella ‘Morpho Eugenia’ shares this magic touch, whereby flesh is made word. It follows the story of young entomologist William Adamson, shipwrecked out of his life as a researcher in the Amazon into the far more slippery territory of an upperclass Victorian family. Placing ants warfare beside William’s reluctant attempts at loving and being loved, wrapping in clouds of butterflies arguments on the existence of a divine creator, the story perfectly captures the tension between body and mind which animates all of Byatt’s work.
Published in Angels and Insects, Chatto & Windus 1992
A Personal Anthology 