I have just read A.S. Byatt’s Peacock and Vine. It is a work of great beauty – to read, to hold and to look at. 

Those who find A.S.Byatt forbiddingly intellectual (an error I think – this is thought married to a great deal more than thought) will find here lots to back up their expectations. For instance, describing a diversion to look at a Monet’s representations of Rouen Cathedral, Byatt’s still act of looking at life is compared to a picture of quotidian gallery visiting.

A steady stream of people walked, without stopping, between me and the paintings … What did they see, what did they remember? I, on the other hand, tried to make my brain record tiny juxtapositions of greys and browns, notations of shade and brightness (p. 164).

 Reduced to a mobile stream, ‘people’ in general, fail to record and remember and they get in the way. They fail to make their brain record and hence live in quotidian motion alone.

That word ‘made’ is interesting, since Byatt claims this book is about ‘work’ (p. 165) in case you hadn’t noticed the emphasis on that word early in the book (p. 23). In a very rich way it is about work - but that perception may even more alienate people (in motion past her) from this assertive ‘I’:

I do not make pilgrimages to places where writers and artists lived. I read their work and think about their colours and words (p. 23).

The notion that anything can come of something not worked at is never a popular idea – although I think a true one.

One element of this ‘work’ however that might go unnoticed is how often Byatt talks not about ‘I’ but ‘we’. I love this passage (which should be read in full):

We have Morris in our house. … We have a window with heavy Morris curtains … I am drawn to Morris patterns which have an under-pattern of tiny dark leaves of evergreens. I don’t think we chose these designs out of a particular devotion to Morris – they were just the most exciting things we found. … (p. 163)

It reminds you of how the work opens:

We were in Venice in April and I was drunk on aquamarine light. …

This sentence has a rhythm that while it begins to lose itself in self-absorbed transformations keeps returning to the fact that I, however absorbed I may become in the pattern of synapses in my own brain, am supported: held in a ‘we’ that matters and which will return over and over through the work. 

And maybe in the more silent thought about the marriages of Morris and Fortuny respectively. 

The one mocked and misunderstood in a loveless marriage which was all 'give', the other working with and for his wife. One unable to draw the human (or even animal) in ways that work – though he writes a most beautiful prose and creates tremendously complex patterns. The other making art that should be seen worn and shifting like the light effects he created for Wagner.

And when she acknowledges her husband, Peter Duffy, it is as that supporting co-creator: ‘We have visited galleries together, both in Venice and in England, and his ideas are always exciting and useful.’

You might notice that this term ‘exciting’ is also that that describes the found treasures of their home, and it is always, I think, in Byatt, a charged word. But it goes here with ‘useful’ – a respect for each other’s work. And I think that matters. 

Because what Rossetti and Jane Morris seemed to miss about William Morris was his dedication to work, as they settled into the house provided for the lovers by the husband’s work. Not so, Fortuny who was:

‘moved by women. Most of all, of course, his wife, Henriette, who worked with him on the design and construction of the fabrics, and modelled them (p. 114).

This concatenation of married love supported by work (the only way sustained and sustaining love can be supported) is very near to Byatt’s heart and near too to the fact that Byatt still reveres Morris’ socialism as well as Proust’s aristocratic art, however unfashionable that attitude. There is real love in this:

Strawberry Thief …was made much later, in 1883, when Morris …, after much effort and many problems, had mastered the difficult technique of indigo discharge.

John Berger would understand the feeling here. Some other feted modern novelists might not.