But she has an abiding contempt for biographical literary criticism and is famed for her irritation or playfulness when presented with crasser readings of her life through her work, or vice versa.

She knows that the passion for science is like any other passion.'Ītwood's novels frequently involve emotional archaeology: her characters are presented to us at some point of crisis: flashbacks sketch out the family histories and adult situations that have led them to those crises (she took a university course on the Bildungsroman ). Lesje 'knows that scientific objectivity is a fraud. Atwood's characters, like Tony in The Robber Bride (1993), a military historian, or Lesje, the classifier of fossils in Life Before Man, find their passions are not sufficient as a defence against the messy emotional entanglements of human beings. Her interests are broad: 'Pop science - usually life sciences - is my casual reading,' she laughs 'I don't have to review it or have an opinion, I can just read it for fun.' Military history is another: in recent weeks, she wrote a not untopical newspaper article on 'Napoleon's big mistakes', of which she remarks, 'I think there probably are lessons you can 'win' but it's very difficult to hold a country of people who hate you'.Īgainst punctiliously rendered backgrounds, human dramas are played out. Nor are her researches limited to the cutting edge of contemporary genetics: her 1979 novel, Life Before Man, set partly in the dinosaur department of a natural history museum, received a positive review in a paleontological magazine ('I was flattered.

it's a brown cardboard box - in which all the research clippings are filed: so there's nothing I can't back up,' says Atwood. 'We have a big box, called The Brown Box.

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