A Whistling Woman was published by Chatto & Windus in 2002, completing the quartet after twenty-four years. Set in 1968-1970, the novel finds Frederica working as a television presenter — a role that combines her intellectual brilliance with her performative temperament — while the fictional University of North Yorkshire becomes a battleground between student revolutionaries, established academics, and a charismatic cult leader whose community has settled nearby.
The novel’s multiple plots converge around the question of how a society negotiates between order and freedom, reason and ecstasy. The student revolutionaries seek to destroy the university as an institution of bourgeois power; the cult offers mystical transcendence through surrender of individual judgment; the scientists pursue knowledge through disciplined method. Frederica — now in her thirties, independent, intellectually confident — must choose which of these she values.
Byatt’s title comes from the proverb “A whistling woman and a crowing hen are neither fit for God nor men” — the superstition that a woman who speaks publicly (who “whistles”) is unnatural. The quartet ends with Frederica having achieved precisely this unnatural condition: a woman who thinks publicly, speaks publicly, lives independently. The cost has been enormous.
Collecting A Whistling Woman
First edition (Chatto & Windus, London, 2002): Cloth with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $20–$50
- Very good: $10–$20