[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&#x...

The action of this careful, complex novel [The Virgin in the Garden] takes place in Yorkshire in Coronation year. Its theme is growing up, coming of age, tasting knowledge. For the leading characters 1953 becomes the year that is to define their temperaments and shape the future…. Each of the six characters caught up in these dramas is pushed to extremity, forced by change, chance and exigency to come to terms with his or her intellectual or sexual being. This is an ambitious novel, heightened by cal...

[The Game,] a deep and able book, is the sensibility romance in its more traditional guise. It not only uses but is deeply sympathetic to those sensitive personal relations, those desires for romantic redemption and for the connection of the prose and the passion, which have been part of its modern stock. The domestic-familial is the root experience, the gropings of the female spirit in adolescence the essential source of character, the search for right faith with right feeling the main line of attack. The ...

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 &...

[It] is clear why Byatt is unknown on these shores: She is very English—insularly so…. She writes out of an imperturbable tradition of English literature, a tradition that takes note of contemporary currents without drifting away on them. The men and women in [The Virgin in the Garden] bear some resemblance to present-day men and women; they also resemble the men and women of Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy—they even, most unfashionably, resemble each other in a w...

The problems of Cassandra and Julia Corbett, the heroines of [The Game], come into the domain of moral philosophy. One solution, it seems, is to recreate life giving it the direction and shape it customarily lacks. Their story is encompassed between two fictions—a Brontëan game of medieval battles and romance which they devised as children and, later on, a novel in which Julia attempts to capture her sister's life. The illusion of omnipotence which games like these offer is clearly full...

[The Virgin in the Garden] is a good example of proper literary ambition. It is, and practically declares itself to be, a novel in the European realist tradition, and it demands comparison with the masters in that tradition. The characters are full and rounded…. Mrs Byatt's talents are not confined to sketching members of a single social class. The integration of the matter of the book—the reign of the first Elizabeth, Astraea, Shakespeare, the scholarship of Frances Yates and others, a...

To be the offspring of genius, even if not everyone considers it genius, must make growing-up even more difficult than it is for most of us. And to write a novel about the process, which involves creating someone whom your readers can believe in as a genius, is even more difficult. That is what Mrs. Byatt has tackled in her first novel, Shadow of a Sun…. It is easy to be somewhat cynical about the earnest sensitivity with which Mrs. Byatt explores … tortured relationships—she is a very ...

["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 chara...

It is an unusual Yorkshire household that A. S. Byatt describes in ["Shadow of a Sun"] …, a countrified, genius-oriented universe in which parental permissiveness is more a matter of default than intention. The author goes to great lengths of prolixity to define her characters, but fails to breathe life into them. Between Anna and her problems there always intrudes an ornamental rhetoric, substituting exposition for the revelation that should come out of a clash of characters. (pp. 32-3...

["The Game"] is a book of uncommon subtlety…. What is so admirable about Mrs. Byatt's treatment of her characters is her blending of what they are with what they believe. The father's passive idealism, Simon's belief in original sin, Cassandra's view of the order and harmony of the universe, and Julia's ritualistic religion are truly part of the action. Yet the author doesn't sacrifice emotion to philosophy; her book is cumulatively exciting.