John Fowles & A. S Byatt as novelists.

Both novelists of the late twentieth century, John Fowles and Antonia Susan Byatt (A. S. Byatt), revisit Victorian times to create fiction that blends older literary conventions with modern attitudes.

John Fowles

The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969) is Fowles's most celebrated novel — the tale of the enigmatic governess Sarah Woodruff, a figure who haunts some of his other works. Critics have described the book as a pastiche of Victorian fiction enriched by twentieth-century insight. Fowles explored diverse themes: psychological suspense in The Collector, exotic erotic tensions in The Magus, the quest for learning through lived experience in Daniel Martin, and even an eighteenth-century Gothic-style mystery in A Maggot. Though hugely influential, his popularity has shown signs of waning in recent years.

A. S. Byatt

A. S. Byatt fuses realistic portrayals of English manners with symbolic layers drawn from history, myth, and art. Deeply influenced by Proust and Iris Murdoch, she earned wide acclaim with the Booker Prize–winning novel Possession (1990), which stages a biographical investigation of an imaginary nineteenth-century poet to probe how readers interpret literature — a work some critics call "an academic whodunnit." Earlier novels include The Shadow of a Sun (a feminist bildungsroman) and The Game (a tragic tale of sisterly rivalry). She also began a historical sequence with The Virgin in the Garden and Still Life, and published the short-story collection Sugar (1987).

BY PKGWAY