Passions of the Mind Selected Writings

by BYATT, A. S.

• ISBN13: 9780679736783
• ISBN10: 0679736786
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1993-03-31
• Publisher: Vintage

Summary

Whether she is writing about George Eliot or Sylvia Plath; Victorian spiritual malaise or Toni Morrison; mythic strands in the novels of Iris Murdoch and Saul Bellow; politics behind the popularity of Barbara Pym or the ambitions that underlie her own fiction, Byatt manages to be challenging, entertaining, and unflinchingly committed to the alliance of literature and life. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Author Biography

A.S. Byatt is the author of the novels <b>Possession</b> (winner of the Booker Prize in 1990), <b>The Game</b>, and the sequence <b>The Virgin in the Garden</b><i>, </i><b>Still Life</b>, and <b>Babel Tower</b>. She has also written two novellas, published together as <b>Angels and Insects</b>, and four collections of shorter works, including <b>The Matisse Stories</b> and <b>The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye</b>. 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.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction	xiii
AS A WRITER
Still Life / Nature morte	3	(11)
``Sugar'' / ``Le Sucre''	14	(7)
VICTORIANS: INCARNATION AND ART
Robert Browning: Fact, Fiction, Lies, Incarnation and Art	21	(42)
George Eliot: A Celebration	63	(5)
George Eliot's Essays	68	(25)
MODERNS: VARYING STRANDS
Accurate Letters: Ford Madox Ford	93	(16)
``The Omnipotence of Thought'': Frazer, Freud and Post-Modernist Fiction	109	(38)
People in Paper Houses: Attitudes to ``Realism'' and ``Experiment'' in English Post-war Fiction	147	(22)
William Golding: Darkness Visible	169	(5)
The TLS Poetry Competition	174	(3)
A Sense of Religion: Enright's God	177	(20)
THE FEMALE VOICE?
Willa Cather	197	(20)
Elizabeth Bowen: The House in Paris	217	(8)
Sylvia Plath: Letters Home	225	(5)
Toni Morrison: Beloved	230	(3)
An Honourable Escape: Georgette Heyer	233	(8)
Barbara Pym	241	(4)
Monique Wittig: The Lesbian Body	245	(8)
VISION AND REALITY
Coleridge: An Archangel a Little Damaged	253	(8)
Charles Rycroft: The Innocence of Dreams	261	(4)
Van Gogh, Death and Summer	265	(38)
Notes	303	(10)
Index	313