A. S. Antonia Susan Byatt Books

In this innovative and wide-ranging book, Byatt and the psychoanalyst Ignes Sodre bring their different sensibilities to bear on six novels they have read and loved: Jane Austen's Mansfield Park , Bronte's Villette , George Elliot's Daniel Deronda , Willa Cather's The Professor's House , Iris Murdoch's An Unofficial Rose , and Toni Morrison's Beloved . The results are nothing less than an education in the ways literature grips its readers and, at times, transforms their lives. Imagining Characters is indispensable, a work of criticism that returns us to the books it discusses with renewed respect and wonder.

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'

Frederica Potter arrives at Cambridge University greedy for knowledge, sex and love. It isn’t long before she becomes infatuated with a mysterious and controlling poet. Back in Yorkshire, her sister Stephanie abandons academia and is confronted with the boredom and frustrations of motherhood. Meanwhile, their younger brother Marcus begins to recover from a nervous breakdown. Each sibling is desperate to shape their own future, but a horrifying event will soon change their lives forever.

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.

The Oxford Book of English Short Stories celebrates the excellences of the English short story. The thirty-seven stories featured here are selected from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, by authors ranging from Dickens, Trollope, and Hardy to J. G. Ballard, Angela Carter, and Ian McEwan. They pack together comedy and tragedy, farce and delicacy, elegance and the grotesque, with language as various as the subject-matter.

These two novellas, MORPHO EUGENIA and THE CONJUGIAL ANGEL, are set in the mid-nineteenth century, weaving fact and fiction, reality and romance. MORPHO EUGENIA is a lively Gothic fable of the Earthly Paradise, of the Victorian obsession with Darwinian theories of breeding and sexuality and the parallels between insect and human society. THE CONJUGIAL ANGEL, a philosophical ghost-story concerns Tennyson's IN MEMORIAM, published in 1850, mourning the death of his friend Arthur Hallam.