Passions of the Mind: Selected Writings

by A. S. Byatt

Overview

The Booker Prize-winning author of Possession and a novelist of “dazzling inventiveness” (Time) delivers a stunning collection of essays on literature and life.  

Whether she is writing about George Eliot or Sylvia Plath; Victorian spiritual malaise or Toni Morrison; mythic strands in the novels of Iris Murdoch and Saul Bellow; politics behind the popularity of Barbara Pym or the ambitions that underlie her own fiction, Byatt manages to be challenging, entertaining, and unflinchingly committed to the alliance of literature and life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780679736783
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/31/1993
Series:	Vintage International
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	702,300
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.95(h) x 0.76(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

Editorial Reviews

A. S. Byatt's "Passions of the Mind," will delight the very literary and intimidate everyone else....Those who persevere, however, will find Ms. Byatt's insights into the writers she discusses both elegant and commanding....Perhaps many of Ms. Byatt's readers will buy "Passions of the Mind" hoping for more of the same. Instead, they will get a straight, bracing dose of the real thing. -- New York Times

Suzanne Berne

Wide-ranging essays in literary criticism from the Booker Prize-winning author of Possession. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Readers of Byatt's Still Life ( LJ 11/15/85) and, to a lesser extent, Possession ( LJ 11/1/90) will find this collection of her criticism true to her quality and themes. The essays range from describing the influences on her own work to analysis of her favorite Victorians, Robert Browning and George Eliot, and such modernist writers as Ford Madox Ford, William Golding, and Iris Murdoch. Some female writers (Willa Cather, Elizabeth Bowen, and Toni Morrison, among others) are treated, as are the relationship of the real and the symbolic, as revealed by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Rycroft, and Vincent Van Gogh. Byatt's interest in the influence of religion on writing shines through. The writing is brilliant, requiring a substantial awareness of English literature and command of the language. For academic and large public libraries. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 10/15/91.-- Ann Irvine, Montgomery Cty. P.L., Md.

Library Journal