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The White Bed Of Desire In A.S. Byatt's Possession, Jennifer Jeffers

English Faculty Publications

The British novelist A. S. Byatt frequently writes about art and color theory in her fiction. In Still Life (1985) Byatt intentionally saturates her text with musings on art and color; bordering on the didactic, she devotes long passages to Van Gogh's chromatics and individual characters' theories on art. With The Matisse Stories (1996) her discussion moves into the theory of complementary colors in the story “Art Work,” through the painter Robin Dennison. Painting for Robin is “a series of problems, really, inexhaustible problems, of light and color, you know” (70). In the 1990 Booker Prize-winning novel Possession: A Romance …