Antonia Susan Byatt

A new play, the highlight of a magnificent local festival celebrating the coronation of Elizabeth II, brings together the young playwright and a brilliant but eccentric family whose personal dramas soon eclipse the entire production

The Virgin in the Garden

A novel which combines enlightenment and sexuality, Elizabethan drama and contemporary comedy. It is a tale of a brilliant and eccentric family, fatefully divided.

Emmett

I embrace Byatt's works like familiar friends every single occasion following my vastly memorable reading of Possession. Her stories are splendid and deliberate, woven with inter-textual references, a tapestry on which the jewels of English language and history glimmer on show. Her every word is sensitive to its poetic inheritance and potential. The Virgin in the Garden is no exception. What I look forward to most in Byatt's work is the way in which a text grows the reader in knowledge and vision, as the characters rush through their own thorn-bushes of human life and ideas. Regardless of the subject-matter that forms the focal point of any particular work (English drama, painting and sculpture, eroticism, royalty & etc.), one is bound to learn. It is not entirely easy, not with Virgil and Spenser quoted off-handedly with Eliot, but with some further reading (or Googling), one receives the rewarding feeling of having exerted effort and gained something in return, having identified some particular resonant knot of poetry, or phrase. Riches are promised to the enthusiastic, literary mind hungry for something more than a story stuck within its papery prison, hungry for the artistry and artifice of the novel in its full splendour. Virgin is effusive, extraneous, some bits admittedly wholly unnecessary and tangential to the plot, but these irrelevant strings are threads that add the extra nuance, colour and life to the embroidered tale, like well-placed adjectives in a sentence. Eschewing the rush and hurry of a devouring mind, then, Virgin demands the deliberation, slowness, dedicated absorption of an intricate, erudite novel.

The Virgin in the Garden

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