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Hard to believe, but A.S. Byatt's Possession: A Romance was published almost 20 years ago. And 20 years on, that fat novel – “a delicious fruitcake fiction” that pushed Dame Antonia Susan onto the international bestseller lists and won her the Booker Prize – remains her main claim to fame, certainly here.

Yet Byatt has not been content to rest her short, stout frame on these laurels, either at the home in London she shares with Peter Duffy, her husband of 40 years, or at her cottage in southern France.

In the two decades since Possession , Byatt has published more than a dozen books, works she either wrote, like the novella collection Angels and Insects and the novel A Whistling Woman (which concluded a tetralogy begun in 1978), or edited or co-edited, like 1998's Oxford Book of Short Stories . Last month in Montreal she was awarded the $10,000 Blue Metropolis International Literary Grand Prize for lifetime literary achievement.

Now she's just published a new novel, The Children's Book . Seven years in gestation, at 615 print-packed pages it's even fatter than Possession . But if initial reviews are any indication, it just could restore to Byatt the popularity she enjoyed in the fin de siècle.

Certainly no one's going to fault The Children's Book for a lack of ambition. As Byatt recently told an interviewer, she wanted to produce a novel that “connected all sorts of things [she] was interested in” – children's literature, pottery, the formation of the Fabian Society, fairy tales, puppetry, the struggle of women to win the vote, child-rearing in late-Victorian England, the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris. Given such a range, you won't be surprised to learn that the novel has a cast of 20 or so major characters progressing from its beginning in 1895 to its end in 1919. Equally unsurprisingly, its author confesses to having used Excel spreadsheets to keep everything and everyone on track.

Byatt was 54 when Possession was published. Now she's rowing toward 73. Of course, she's no longer as spry as she once was – if one can use that term to describe someone severely asthmatic and bed-ridden as a child and later, as an adult, diagnosed with seasonal affective disorder. At the conclusion of a recent morning interview in her Canadian publisher's office in Toronto, it took her a couple of surges to get out of her chair.

But the mind, once sufficiently caffeinated, stands as a formidable, probing, book-lined thing. In person, she conveys a mixture of intellectual heft and self-effacement, friendliness and wariness. Eighteen years ago, a New York Times writer described her as a cross of British foreign secretary with school headmistress. That still seems about right.

“ The older I get, the more I think human beings have a deep need for something to go right”

Byatt confesses to having a “naturally gloomy nature,” intensified surely by the death of her only son, at age 11, in the early 1970s. In fact, Byatt still believes that “tragedy is the highest from of literature.” Yet The Children's Book , for all its suicides, ghastly behaviour (incest included) and deaths in the trenches of First World War France, is a rather upbeat book, filled with acts of kindness, creativity and grace between men, women, adults, children and classes. Byatt calls it a “recording of those bits that fiction has tended to under-emphasize.

“As I get older, I lose that novel writer's compulsion to do damage to my characters,” she observed with a chuckle. “When I was young, one had the sense that the better the book, the more tragic the outcome. Yet Shakespeare took to comedy as he got old. While I wouldn't call The Children's Book a comedy because all sorts of terrible things happen, it's not remorseless. ... The older I get, the more I think human beings have a deep need for something to go right. And it's not true that nothing ever goes right in life: My own mother rose quite successfully from the working class ... and got to go to Cambridge, whereas in most novels, or at least too many of them, to be working class is, well, the end.”

There's no one central character in The Children's Book . It's more tableau vivant or panorama – a function largely of Byatt's desire to explore the domestic arrangements of late Victorian-Edwardian society which of necessity involved “a lot of children.” Before the 1880s, pregnancy was often a death sentence for the mother or the babe or both, Byatt observed. “The wicked stepmother was actually a real person because your mother was quite likely to have died when you were born and you had a stepmother who quite naturally preferred her own children. Unless, that is, she was a saint.”

As the 20th century neared, however, and sanitation and medical procedures improved, “more and more babies didn't die.” As a result, there were larger families, “parents who came to know their children better,” and the rise of a body of children's literature by writers such as Kenneth Grahame, E. Nesbit, Beatrix Potter and J.M. Barrie.

Writers, in fact, form an important “grouplet” in The Children's Book , and, in their “wickedness and irresponsibility,” not an altogether endearing one. Foremost among them is Olive Wellwood, a miner's daughter married into the upper middle class who, from her home in the bucolic Kent countryside, writes children's stories in the fairy-tale mode for both her many offspring and an avid public. There's also Herbert Methley, a controversial novelist and nudist whose articulate advocacy of free love and personal liberation masks the sensibility of a sexual predator.

To create Methley, Byatt adopted a method she used for several other characters in the novel. That is, “everybody's got at least three originals,” she explained. In Methley's case, she drew on the biographies of novelists H.G. Wells, D.H. Lawrence and John Cowper Powys. “In a curious way,” this strategy “means each character gets to have his or her own life, not the shadow life of, say, Oscar Wilde or Henry James,” she said. Another advantage is that “none of the invented characters are a mixture of me and somebody. I am the reader and the writer, not the character.”

Part of Possession 's huge appeal was the pseudo-Victorian love letters, stories and poems Byatt invented for her narrative. This touch of “Victorian postmodernism” gets a reprise in The Children's Book as Byatt includes several Olive Wellwood tales and, at novel's end, a selection of three bitter First World War poems attributed to another character, Julian Cain.

Amusingly, The New Yorker recently published one of these poems under Byatt's byline and not the fictitious Cain's. She was showing the poems to her friend Philip Haas, director of the 1995 film Angels and Insects , who, in turn, brought them to the attention of his friend, New Yorker poetry editor and versifier Paul Muldoon. When Muldoon asked to see the poetry, Byatt tried to put him off with a series of “flustered e-mails,” saying she wasn't a poet and what she had written was for novelistic purposes only. Muldoon, however, insisted and persisted and prevailed, to what Byatt now says is her “huge amazement and intense pleasure.”

It's now been 45 years since the publication of Byatt's first novel. Time enough, one would think, for any author to be comfortable with if not the writing itself then at least the writing enterprise. Not so for Byatt.

“I think I am scared of writing,” she admitted. Yes, it remains “one of the few jobs that women can do at home and still have children.” (Byatt, twice-married, has three grown daughters.) But “it makes you feel ghostly. ... There's something about it that takes up so much of somebody's life and mind. It knocks out of them the attention they might give, say, to their wives and children, or, in Olive Wellwood's case, their husband.”

Still, at 72, what else can Antonia Susan Byatt do? As our interview neared its end, she told me she had only a fortnight to finish her latest project: Philip Haas is installing a mixed-media presentation called Butchers, Dragons, Gods and Skeletons at the Kimbell Art Museum in Dallas in July, and “he has told me – he has not asked – that I am writing the book to go with it.” Her voice was a mixture of unease and relish.