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.
![Hailed by The New York Times Book Review as "a gifted observer, able to discern the exact details that bring whole worlds into being" and "a storyteller who could keep a sultan on the edge of his throne for a thousand and one nights," A. S. Byatt writes some of the most engaging and skillful novels of our time. Time magazine calls her "a novelist of dazzling inventiveness."
Possession, for which Byatt won England's prestigious Booker Prize, was praised by critics on both sides of the Atlantic when it was first published in 1990. "On academic rivalry and obsession, Byatt is delicious. On the nature of possession—the lover by the beloved, the biographer by his subject—she is profound," said The Sunday Times (London). The New Yorker dubbed it "more fun to read than The Name of the Rose . . . Its prankish verve [and] monstrous richness of detail [make for] a one-woman variety show of literary styles and types." The novel traces a pair of young academics—Roland Michell and Maud Bailey—as they uncover a clandestine love affair between two long-dead Victorian poets. Interwoven in a mesmerizing pastiche are love letters and fairytales, extracts from biographies and scholarly accounts, creating a sensuous and utterly delightful novel of ideas and passions.
With an Introduction by the author that describes the novel's origins and its twenty-year gestation, this Modern Library edition is a handsome keepsake for fans of Possession—new and old alike.](https://cdn11.bigcommerce.com/s-ezptpblrxu/images/stencil/500x659/products/1135/1848/PossesionModern__58320.1660081710.jpg?c=2 "Hailed by The New York Times Book Review as \"a gifted observer, able to discern the exact details that bring whole worlds into being\" and \"a storyteller who could keep a sultan on the edge of his throne for a thousand and one nights,\" A. S. Byatt writes some of the most engaging and skillful novels of our time. Time magazine calls her \"a novelist of dazzling inventiveness.\"
Possession, for which Byatt won England's prestigious Booker Prize, was praised by critics on both sides of the Atlantic when it was first published in 1990. \"On academic rivalry and obsession, Byatt is delicious. On the nature of possession—the lover by the beloved, the biographer by his subject—she is profound,\" said The Sunday Times (London). The New Yorker dubbed it \"more fun to read than The Name of the Rose . . . Its prankish verve [and] monstrous richness of detail [make for] a one-woman variety show of literary styles and types.\" The novel traces a pair of young academics—Roland Michell and Maud Bailey—as they uncover a clandestine love affair between two long-dead Victorian poets. Interwoven in a mesmerizing pastiche are love letters and fairytales, extracts from biographies and scholarly accounts, creating a sensuous and utterly delightful novel of ideas and passions.
With an Introduction by the author that describes the novel's origins and its twenty-year gestation, this Modern Library edition is a handsome keepsake for fans of Possession—new and old alike.")
