["The Virgin in the Garden"] is grave, solid, ample as a Yorkshire tea, with deliberate hints of the Northern tradition of Mrs. Gaskell and Charlotte Brontë, even down to having a curate for one of its main characters….

Byatt's portrait of [a] hypersensitive, schizoid boy, his senses invaded by terrors and visions, holding annihilation at bay by repeating mathematical formulae, is beautifully empathetic. Self-defense through the intellect is practiced by other of her characters, and something of the sort bedevils the author's own style. She is at her best in bringing her characters alive, and they live on in the mind. But the book is overdecorated with tags and references from Elizabethan literature that smell of the lecture room; her characters quote lines of verse at one another in a way that I thought went out with Dorothy L. Sayers.

But Byatt is essentially a fine, careful and...