[The Virgin in the Garden] is a very good book. It is a large, complex, ambitious work, humming with energy and ideas. It is a highly intellectual operation. The characters do a great deal of thinking, and have extremely interesting thoughts which are developed at length. But this is no tract or treatise; it is a strong, confident, very long traditional novel, a remarkable achievement. At a time when some critics doom the novel to brevity, narrowness, dryness and ultimate degeneration into a 'text', Mrs Byatt's lively monster triumphantly exhibits the form as a playground for a powerful omnivorous intelligence….

This is, essentially, a historical novel, but set in a period which never seems remote. There is a good deal of 'social comment', but this is never obtrusive and is subjected to the strong necessities of the story. Irrepressible intellectual interests in a novelist may obstruct the most...