Besides the intellectual artifice, at the heart of the boxes within boxes, puns, parodies, donnish and in-groupy references, which I imagine an American reader will feel impatient with, there is something important and accessible, relevant and potentially gripping in The Virgin in the Garden. Consider the virgin, consider the garden. The virgin is Frederica and Queen Elizabeth I and, beyond that, the idea of female intactness, Virgo-Astraea, the Greek sense of belonging to oneself (the original meaning of "virginity").

Alexander's play and especially Frederica's part in it focus on Elizabeth's (actual) declaration that she would not bleed, her choice of lifelong virginity, and the perhaps concomitant "masculine" strength of her character and her reign…. Hovering over the play and Byatt's novel are questions: what is female strength? how is it possible? Frederica is surrounded by women whose "submission" to sexual life has left them less than they were...