The Children's Book
Page 80
I owe a great deal to Marian Campbell, who showed me the gold and silver in the Victoria and Albert Museum—and understood that I would need the Gloucester Candlestick. She also showed me the basement and its treasure. Reino Liefkes showed me the ceramics department, including works by Palissy, and early Majolica dishes. A pot in the hands is quite different from a pot behind glass. Fiona McCarthy sent me her copy of Anthony Burton’s Vision and Accident about the Museum—I saw I needed my own, and bought one. Her work on William Morris has also been hugely helpful. I am grateful to Sir Christopher Frayling, who sent me books about the Royal College of Art and talked to me about it.
My daughter, Antonia Byatt, when director of the English Women’s Library, helped me with the history of women’s suffrage and introduced me to Anne Summers, and to Jennian Geddes, whose generous provision of information about women in medicine at the time of my novel was both fascinating and extraordinarily helpful.
Edmund de Waal invited me to visit his studio, and allowed me to put my hands into a wavering clay pot. He also gave me books and suggested more, and I owe him a great deal. I was also helped by Mary Wondrausch whose book on slipware—apart from being full of interest—was also full of technical information and delectable vocabulary.
My friend and translator Melanie Walz, who lives in Munich, showed me the city and took me to the puppet museum—and everywhere else—and shared her wide knowledge of German and Bavarian art and life, over many years. The book could not have been written without her. I am also grateful to Professor Martin Middeke who took me to the Augsburg puppet museum, and to Deborah Holmes and Ingrid Schram who took me to see the Teschner collection in the Austrian Theatre Museum in Vienna, and to the Museum of Applied Arts there, where I learned a great deal, with great pleasure, from Dr. Rainald Franz. And I would like to thank Dimitri Psurtsev and Victor Lanchikov for help with things Russian.
Dr. Gillian Sutherland shared her knowledge of the history of women in Cambridge, and of Newnham College in particular—and again sent books. I am very grateful. Professor Max Saunders helped me with the Rossetti anarchists and his work on the period was informative and elegant.
The books I have collected are too many to mention but I should like to acknowledge the pleasure and information I found in David Kynaston’s great history of the City of London. Linda K. Hughes’s Life of Graham R. is full of detail, and Professor Hughes herself answered arcane queries with generosity. I am indebted to Peter Chasseaud’s splendid Rats Alley, which is a comprehensive description of the trench names of the Western Front. Andrew Ramen at Heywood Hill helped me at the very beginning of this work by collecting and suggesting books on puppetry and other things. I reread Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy’s terrifying book on public schools, which helped, as can be seen.
Dominic Gregory went to look at inns near Dungeness and sent me a pebble with a hole in it.
My American publishers at Knopf have been, and continue to be, encouraging, meticulous and generous. I am grateful for Sonny Mehta’s enthusiasm. I immensely enjoy working with Robin Desser, my editor at Knopf—I am very happy that we have now worked together for a considerable time. Steven Barclay, my American lecture agent, is both a good friend and extraordinarily competent and imperturbable.
My publisher at Chatto and Windus, Alison Samuel, and my editor, Jenny Uglow, to whom this novel is dedicated, have been supportive and imaginative. Patrick Hargadon discussed knotty narrative points beyond the call of duty. My agent in the States, Melanie Jackson, has been both wise about the novel, and precise about practical matters. My British agent Deborah Rogers has looked after me, in more ways than I could have imagined, and I owe a great deal to her and to her assistants, Hannah West-land and Mohsen Shah. Lindsey Andrews was diligent and helpful when she worked as my assistant. And I am as always very grateful for Gill Marsden’s patient and faultless typing, and for her calm interest in the work.
Finally, I was amazed by Stephen Parker’s beautiful cover design, and Gabriele Wilson’s elegant American adaptation of it. They are exactly right and all I could have wished for.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
A. S. Byatt is internationally acclaimed as a novelist, short story writer and critic. Her novels include Possession, awarded the Booker Prize in 1990; the quartet The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower and A Whistling Woman; The Game; and The Biographer’s Tale. She has also written two novellas, published together as Angels and Insects, and five collections of shorter works, including The Matisse Stories and Little Black Book of Stories, as well as several works of nonfiction. Educated at Cambridge, she was a senior Lecturer in English and American literature at University College, London. She lives in London.
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2009 by A. S. Byatt
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by
Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered
trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Originally published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus,
the Random House Group, Ltd., London, in 2009.
The poem “Trench Names” originally appeared in The New Yorker.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Byatt, A. S. (Antonia Susan), [date]
The children’s book : a novel / by A. S. Byatt.—1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-27295-9
1. Women authors—Fiction. 2. Children and adults—Fiction.
3. Runaway children—Fiction. 4. Country homes—England—Fiction.
5. Family secrets—Fiction. 6. World War, 1914–1918—England—Fiction.
I. Title.
PR6052.Y2C48 2009
823’914—dc22
2009016334
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and
incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination
or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual
persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely
coincidental.
v3.0