In Possession, A.S. Byatt produced a tour de force that wed Victorian romanticism to modern sensibility, a novel that combined the elements of mystery, romance, and scholarship in an utterly captivating narrative. Those same ingredients are present in The Virgin in the Garden--a wonderfully erudite entertainment in which enlightenment and sexuality, Elizabethan drama and contemporary comedy, intersect richly and unpredictably. This tale of a brilliant and eccentric family fatefully divided is sure to please the thousands of readers who made Possession a national bestseller.
Editorial Reviews
"A novelist of dazzling inventiveness." --Time
"Large, complex, ambitious, humming with energy and ideas...a remarkable achievement." --Iris Murdoch
"An ambitious novel [whose] narrative everywhere displays knowledge and intelligence." --The Times Literary Supplement (London)
"Byatt is a gifted observer, able to discern the exact details that bring whole worlds into being." --The New York Times Book Review
About the Author
A.S. Byatt is the author of the novels Possession (winner of the Booker Prize in 1990), The Game, and the sequence The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, and Babel Tower. She has also written two novellas, published together as Angels and Insects, and four collections of shorter works, including The Matisse Stories and The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye. Educated at Cambridge, she was a senior lecturer in English at University College, London, before becoming a full-time writer in 1983. A distinguished critic as well as a novelist, she lives in London.