The Virgin In The Garden Is The First Novel To Feature Frederica Potter, And The Beginning Of A Triumphant Quartet Of Novels. Set In Yorkshire In 1952 As The Inhabitants Of The Area Set About Celebrating The Accession Of A New Queen, This Is The Tale Of A Brilliant And Eccentric Family Fatefully Divided. The Virgin In The Garden Is A Wonderfully Entertaining Novel, In Which Enlightenment And Sexuality, Elizabethan Drama And Comedy Intersect Richly And Unpredictably.
A.S. Byatt's anthology departs from her normal subject matter. As well as giving the reader a magical thrill the stories also send shivers down the spine. By turns funny, spooky, sparkling, and sad, these tales will linger in your mind forever.
This volume is the sixth in the British Council's "New Writing" series. From some of Britain's most formidable literary talent, it places new names alongside more established ones, and offers contributions ranging from poetry to essays, and from short stories to previews of novels in progress.
The works collected in this volume provide an illuminating introduction to George Eliot's incisive views on religion, art and science, and the nature and purpose of fiction. Essays such as 'Evangelical Teaching' show her rejecting her earlier religious beliefs, while 'Woman in France' questions conventional ideas about female virtues and marriage, and 'Notes on Form in Art' sets out theories of idealism and realism that she developed further in Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda. It also includes selections from Eliot's translations of works by Strauss and Feuerbach that challenged many ideas about Christianity; excerpts from her poems; and reviews of writers such as Wollstonecraft, Goethe and Browning. Wonderfully rich in imagery and observations, these pieces reveal the intellectual development of this most challenging and rewarding of writers.
Winner of the 1990 Booker Prize, this novel describes the romance between two 19th century poets and the parallel relationship of their two biographers and includes passages of 'Victorian verse'
From the author of The New York Times bestseller Possession, comes a highly acclaimed novel which captures in brilliant detail the life of one extended English family--and illuminates the choices they must make between domesticity and ambition, life and art. Toni Morrison, author of Beloved, writes of Byatt: "When it comes to probing characters her scalpel is sure but gentle. She is a loving surgeon".
A remarkable, sumptuously illustrated exploration of the links between fiction, writers of fiction and portraits -- by the acclaimed Booker Prize winner. Portraits seem the opposite of fiction, fixed in time and space, not running with the curve of a story or a life. Yet since the birth of the novel, writers have been fascinated by portraits as icons, as motifs, as images of character and evocations of past time. A.S. Byatt delves into the complex relations between portraits and characters, and between portraits and novels as whole works of art. Her authors range from Henry James to Iris Murdoch, her artists from Holbein to Botticelli, Manet to the present day. She looks at the way writers use portraits to conjure up the past, as in Ford Madox Ford’s The Fifth Queen and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. She explores their erotic use, the idea of painting as a sexual act, full of danger. And she examines the creation of fictional portrait painters by writers like Balzac and Zola, whose writing was closely linked, in different ways, to the art of Cézanne. A feast for the eye and for the imagination, Portraits in Fiction is a remarkable and immensely enjoyable exploration of the marriage of two great genres.
These two novellas are set in the mid-19th-century, weaving together fact and fiction, reality and romance. "Morpho Eugenia" is a Gothic fable of the Earthly Paradise; "The Conjugal Angel" is a philosophical ghost story
"Possession is an exhilarating novel of wit and romance, at once an intellectual mystery and a triumphant love story. It is the tale of a pair of young scholars researching the lives of two Victorian poets. As they uncover their letters, journals, and poems, and track their movements from London to Yorkshire - from spiritualist séances to the fairy-haunted far west of Brittany - what emerges is an extraordinary counterpoint of passions and ideas."--Back cover.
This Intoxicating Novel Stands On Its Own, While Forming A Triumphant Conclusion To A. S. Byatt'S Great Quartet Depicting The Clashing Forces In English Life From The Early 1950S To 1970. While Frederica Falls Almost By Accident Into A Career In Television In London, Tumultuous Events In Her Home County Of Yorkshire Threaten To Change Her Life, And Those Of The People She Loves. Through Her Wayward, Lovingly-Drawn Characters And Breath-Taking Twists Of Plot, Byatt Illuminates The Effervescence Of The 1960S - Both Its Excitements And Its Dangers - As No One Has Done Before. Magical And Thought-Provoking, And With Spine-Chilling Moments, A Whistling Woman Is The Ultimate Novel Of Ideas Made Flesh - Gloriously Sensual, Sexy And Scary, Bursting With Ideas, And Wonderful Humanity.
