My introduction to her work was recent and began with the Frederica Potter series comprising four novels published between 1978 and 2002. Over the course of this year, I felt my life merging with that of the Potter family. I happened to be reading The Virgin in the Gardens (1978) a month after the death of Queen Elizabeth II. The novel is set in 1952, the year she was crowned. One of its characters, Bill Potter, an English teacher at the school where a play on the Queen’s coronation is to be held, is miffed at his family. His eldest daughter, Stephanie, a Cambridge graduate, is marrying a curate despite her father’s strict anti-religious sentiments. The younger daughter Frederica is desperate to play the queen’s role and does her best to seduce the teacher/playwright, Alexander. The youngest child, Marcus, is obsessed with mathematics, and a biology teacher at school. Right off, I felt tied to Byatt and her erudition. She creates a range of voices that make each character distinctive. Given the number of characters in the novel, the effect is almost otherworldly.

The Potter family saga continues in Still Life (1985), Babel Tower (1996) and A Whistling Woman (2002) as Frederica Potter moves from school to university, and then to a toxic domesticity. It finally concludes in 1968. Her story is a move toward writing on the “desirability of an androgynous mind”. Byatt said it was important for her to bring out the battle of the sexes in “communication”. It begins with Stephanie and Frederica’s tussle with their father and is carried forward in the relationships that the girls share with boys and men as they grow up. In the third book, Frederica wonders, “If Leo (her son) met me, met Frederica, somewhere else, where Frederica was Frederica, at least there would be some truthfulness. He would be angry, but we would talk.”

A similar politics of gender and identity is at work in The Matisse Stories (1993), which comprises three pieces of short fiction inspired by the French painter’s works. The first, Medusa’s Ankles, is set in a beauty salon where a woman and her hairdresser bond over a print of Matisse’s pink nude. “She came to trust him with her disintegration” until she couldn’t bear to see her ankles anymore. The other stories in the collection similarly bring the paintings closer to the characters’ mundane lives. Byatt’s writing scatters and rearranges the reader even as it holds them in place, between the pages of her books.

It is impossible to walk out of one of her novels without having prepared a reading list. I devoured DH Lawrence’s The Rainbow and Women in Love because the relationships of the Potter sisters were inspired by Byatt’s ambivalence towards Lawrence’s Ursula and Gudrun. Then, through The Matisse Stories, Byatt makes the reader think deeply of both, colours that come into being and the makings of an individual’s conscience. Are human lives centred around shapes and colours? Or are we just passing time exchanging delusions about shades? Byatt did not seek to be a guru who issued commands to her readers. She wanted them to think independently.

Reading Possession, I feel a freedom to think. The quality of transcendence that the author offers is not a moment of self-discovery, or self-help. Rather, it has to do with what becomes of one’s mind and emotions as they encounter her peculiar array of characters. Byatt once stated that the scope of her novels was similar to that of George Eliot’s work. So The Virgin in the Garden is a contemporary rendition of Middlemarch while Babel Tower riffs on the development of consciousness like Daniel Deronda does. Byatt was inspired too by Iris Murdoch’s philosophical questions about the state of things. Indeed, Roland Michell’s pursuit of Randolph Henry Ash’s love life in Possession echoes Charles Arrowby’s fatal desire for Mary Fitch in The Sea, The Sea.

Critics often wondered if, given the size of Byatt’s books, they would be relevant in the 21st century. In response she said that she saw hope in readers across the world who came out in hordes to speak to her and share their thoughts on her novels.

AS Byatt’s literary career spanned several decades and captured what it meant to be alive in a specific time. Her novels are replete with the political events that shaped 20th century English society. While her death is a loss to the world of literature, it almost felt like a personal blow to me. I had grown close to her through her books. “I don’t consider readers, particular readers. I write what I have to, what I see,” she said.

Over the last year, her words sustained this particular reader, carrying me forward in a turbulent world.

Rahul Singh is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Presidency University, Kolkata.