Imagining Characters: Six Conversations about Women Writers

by A. S. Byatt, Ignes Sodre

Overview

The Booker Prize-winning author of Possession and a revered psychoanalyst team up to share their insights on six of their favorite novels. 

In this innovative and wide-ranging book, Byatt and the psychoanalyst Ignes Sodre bring their different sensibilities to bear on six novels they have read and loved: Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, Brontë's Villette, George Elliot's Daniel Deronda, Willa Cather's The Professor's House, Iris Murdoch's An Unofficial Rose, and Toni Morrison's Beloved. The results are nothing less than an education in the ways literature grips its readers and, at times, transforms their lives. Imagining Characters is indispensable, a work of criticism that returns us to the books it discusses with renewed respect and wonder.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780679777533
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	09/02/1997
Series:	Vintage International
Edition description:	1 VINTAGE
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	421,381
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.66(d)

About the Author

A. S. Byatt was the author of numerous novels, including The Children’s Book, The Biographer’s Tale, and Possession, which was awarded the Booker Prize. She also wrote two novellas, published together as Angels & Insects, five collections of short stories, and several works of nonfiction. A distinguished critic and author, and the recipient of the 2016 Erasmus Prize for her “inspiring contribution to ‘life writing,’” she died in 2023.

Hometown:

London, England; France

Date of Birth:

August 24, 1936

Place of Birth:

Sheffield, England

Education:

B.A., Newnham College, Cambridge, 1957; graduate study at Bryn Mawr College and Somerville College