By John Fowles
First in a series of 3 installments — 26 October 2008
The Magus is a book about a modern man drawn into a scheme that, while fascinating, is really more like an intricate private fantasy than anything we can imagine happening in real life. The Collector takes place buried in the psychological prison of an enclosure behind a secret door at the back of a basement. How disconcerting it was that the third book of Fowles’ I read should open up its doors on the Victorian era.
For readers of the English language, the Victorian era is the closest thing we have to public space in the world of literature. Wuthering Heights, Emma, Pride and Prejudice, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, Alice in Wonderland, The Christmas Carol; even in a modern America that shuns literacy and denies the importance of anything even slightly old or unfamiliar, our schools and our teachers do seem to recognize that there’s something universal in these stories that can engage children. From early childhood it was always Victorian images that were the strongest in my mind when I was asked to imagine the past, the way the world must have been before the invention of cars and lightbulbs. Knights in armor, cowboys and horses, all these had the aura of something that was partly make believe. But the Masterpiece Theater world of Victorian England was the world as it really was.
In this book, Fowles puts his own research at the forefront. He’s constantly breaking into the narration with references to his sources, with data about the working life of Victorian servants, the prejudices of the middle and aristocratic classes, and especially with reminders about how we must not mistake the attitudes of the Victorians with those of today’s world.
Far from breaking the illusion, these references serve to make this novel feel more real and more interesting, not only because you feel like you’re getting a really high quality tour of the world as it once existed, but also because in setting his novel in the Victorian Era, Fowles has found a perfect setting for his own ideas.
This is how I would propose it: In The Collector, Fowles shows us two people separated by a wall that cannot be broken. The wall is composed of class prejudices, of sexual desire and internal repression, of primal fear and of self-absorption. In The Magus, we see the story of a man who, through the extraordinary efforts of an eccentric millionaire, is allowed for just a moment to see his own personal walls shattered. It’s a compelling story, at least to me, but it’s somehow very hard to understand completely what barriers it is that Nicholas Urfe breaks down, because he lives in the same world we all do.
But the world of The French Lieutenant’s Woman is far enough removed from our own that we’re able to distance ourselves from the character of Charles Smithson, a young man who expects to inherit a baronetcy and a substantial fortune, who’s on the verge of affecting a very comfortable marriage with a woman—Ernestina—who seems perfectly satisfactory by all the standards Charles has been trained to apply to the world around him.
And then there’s the outcast woman, Sarah Woodruff, called “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” by some and “The French Lieutenant’s Whore” by others, because she is said to have lost her virginity to a handsome foreigner who has since abandoned her.
John Fowles tells us that the phenomenon of Charles falling in love with Sarah is identical to the end of the Victorian era. And because he’s dug up so many wonderful facts and stories about 19th Century England to illustrate his point, this rather abstract metaphor becomes quite visceral and believable. Unlike Nicholas Urfe’s brief period of disorientation at the hands of the scheming Maurice Conchis, Charles’ crisis is drawn out over more than a hundred pages as he resists Sarah, condemns her as mad, sees his hopes for inheritance dashed, runs for consolation to the seamy demimonde of London, and finally succumbs to the temptation to destroy the self that Sarah represents.
It works precisely because Victorian literature is characterized by such a wonderful tradition of coincidence. Whereas Maurice Conchis’s whole consciousness shattering project seemed a labyrinthine contrivance whose complexity often obscured the revelation at its own heart, the downfall of Charles Smithson seems to be driven by the same forces that drove the fates of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens’s characters.
IB Singer said that every writer needs to find stories that no one else can tell. It’s impossible for me to imagine anyone else telling the story of Sarah Woodruff. Fowles intentionally makes her an enigma. The great characters of the Victorian era, Sherlock Holmes and Emma Woodhouse, Ebenezer Scrooge and David Copperfield all are so vivid that they can live inside our minds. But Sarah Woodruff seems to pass mysteriously just beyond our grasp in a way that eludes the Victorian style and makes this novel seem truly a feat of magic.
Second in series of three installments — 2 November 2008
So what is it that this Sarah Woodruff symbolizes? Like the White Whale in Moby Dick, she stands at the center of a network of symbolism that fills up the whole book, but she never quite passes completely into the realm of pure symbol. In one very interesting chapter Fowles pulls out of the narrative entirely and declares that, although Sarah, like all the characters in the novel, is his creation, he cannot and will not reveal her inner motives, although he had planned to do so. She won’t reveal them up to her author.
Sarah stands out as being the only character in the book that acts even slightly an adult. This is another theme that seems to run through Fowles’s books—although the characters are all adults with adult responsibilities, they seem to be ruled by a set of childish vanities. Charles and Ernestina go through life as though they’re living in a fairy tale, partly because that’s precisely what they are doing. They’re both slated to earn huge inheritances, and while they each have their little cavils and pouting fits with one another, they’re both bolstered deep down by the thought that the ultimate struggle that lies in store for them is the choice of what kind of prosperity exactly they want to choose. Will they move into the large manor house or the small manor house? Will Charles carry on with his amateur paleontology, or will he find some other hobby to occupy his time but not fulfill his longing to ambition.
At first, Sarah seems to be childish as well. She spends her life moping about, staring at the sea, presumably in hopes that the French Lieutenant who once seduced her will come back. But as the novel progresses and she continues to meet with Charles in the primeval groves of the wild region known as the Undercliff, it begins to become clear that she’s not as much a victim of childish passion as we first thought. Does she really have any illusion that her French Lieutenant will ever come back? Did she even love him in the first place? And if not, why does she willingly allow herself to remain in a community where she’ll always be shunned as a fallen woman? Confused by these questions, Charles confides in his fellow Darwinist Dr Grogan, the only man he can trust to respond rationally.
As a Darwinist and atheist, Dr Grogan seems to stand outside the prison of stereotypes and that defines the Victorian era of this book, and yet his response hardly seems that of a reasonable man. He feels certain that Sarah is dangerously ill and must be institutionalized immediately. She is, after all, the inferior of Charles, who must seem to her like a god.
As it turns out, Dr Grogan is correct in thinking that Sarah represents a great danger to Charles’s future as a happy Victorian gentleman, but his notion that Sarah is mad seems diametrically opposed to the sort of rational humanism that Grogan wishes to represent.
The Undercliff, where Charles and Sarah meet, is home to a series of fossils that inspire Charles to realize the fact that Darwin’s natural not only carries the potential for evolutionary progress but also for mass extinction. Sarah Woodruff represents all the forces that will eventually extinguish the Victorian era, but what are those forces? I think that the answer lies in the other name that she’s given by the people of Lyme Regis, the name that’s used least frequently in the book: Tragedy. The true blindness of the Victorian era is not just a denial of sexual desires or the baser nature of even the most refined gentleman, but rather the denial of the tragic nature of life, in the sense of Greek or Shakespearean tragedy where a system destroys itself by its own striving toward nobility. The name “Tragedy” is appropriate for Sarah, but not so much because she’s a victim of tragedy but an agent of tragic catharsis. Although I doubt I can get to the bottom of it, I will try to expand on that idea in my next installment of this review.
Third installment • 23 November 2008
I remember one time I had an acting teacher who suggested that we almost always see the people around us as representations of something rather than as actual human beings. We see people as representations of our ambitions, as challenges to our status, as political opponents or as collaborators at work, as role-models and as supervisors, as parents or children, but it’s exceedingly rare that we simply view them as people who have been set as unwillingly and unwittingly into the great en medias res of life as we ourselves have been.
That memory came to me today as I was thinking about what more there was for me to say about French Lieutenant’s Woman. It seems to me that in all of Fowles’s works I’ve read so far, his central theme is precisely this blindness we carry around with us, this blindness which keeps us from ever quite recognizing the people around us for what they really are. Victorian society especially seems to depend on such blindness. Charles and his fiancée Ernestina enter into the book with a pat answer to every question of human nature that might come their way.
What makes this argument worth listening to is that Fowles doesn’t write off the blindness of the age as a mere handicap. He’s explicit about the fact that he has a great admiration for the achievements of Victorian society, for the incredible productivity and creativity that arose during that time, but he does seem to suggest that these benefits were achieved at the price of creating a society that was incredibly rigid and unyielding in its notions of human value.
I think that one of the weaknesses of Fowles is that his focus on satori-like moment when the scales fall away from a person’s eyes requires him to make his plots pivot on these moments of personal revelation that are very difficult to communicate to the reader and that must seem contrived and alienating to anyone who hasn’t experienced such moments themselves. One of the ways that Fowles manages to get around this problem is by repeatedly bringing up excerpts of poetry by Tennyson and Clough that are always closely attuned to the inner entrapments and awakenings of Fowles’s characters. Another way that he manages this is by admitting that the character of Sarah Woodruff resists even the omnipotence of the novelist. He cannot see fully into her mind, cannot even guess at her true motivations, and in the end this puts her not only beyond the Victorian stereotypes that Charles uses to navigate his way through life, but also puts her outside of the Freudian and Marxist analyses with which Fowles tries to explain his other characters.
The Collector
by John Fowles. (1963) Published by Dell. 255 pages.
Reviewed 21 October 2008
I decided to change my reading habits a little. Normally, I try to read switch directions as often as possible, to jump from classical to contemporary authors, from fiction to nonfiction and so on as often as possible. But I decided to see what it would be like to focus on one author whom I like a lot. After being so bowled over last year by The Magus, I decided to go back to John Fowles and find out what else he’s written.
The Collector is a book whose subject is so dark—it tells the story the kidnapping of a girl by a young man with a distinctly bland set of sociopathic tendencies—that it’s hard to say “Oh, I just love that book” without depicting oneself as something of a pervert.
While the scenario itself has all the lurid elements of captivity and depravity that are celebrated today in the mythology built up around Hannibal Lecter or the Saw series of movies, it’s notable that there are no scenes of outright torture in this book. The kidnapper, who adopts the false name Ferdinand, goes out of his way to create a comfortable environment for his captive. Does that mitigate his crime or does it serve rather to underscore the fact that no amount of comfort can serve as compensation for the crime of depriving an innocent of her freedom.
There’s something essentially acidic in John Fowles. I think he knew deep down the strident, judgmental direction that literary criticism was headed in, the way that young students especially are encouraged to condemn first and foremost to condemn the author. I think that at some level the sly and Machiavellian Fowles not only anticipated this trend, but he also decided quite deliberately in this, his first published novel, to offer himself up as a sort of intentional sacrifice, and then to profit from the confusion of those who would condemn him.
The first knee-jerk reaction of today’s critic would be to condemn Fowles for writing the ultimate puerile male fantasy novel, a masturbatory wish fulfillment of a man who seeks only to possess a woman, to own her as an object without ever recognizing her as a person.
The second part of the novel takes the form of the diary of “Ferdinand’s” captive Miranda. It is clear after only a short time that Miranda has a far greater claim to the author’s sympathies, and this must give the lie to the knee-jerk condemnation of the book laid out above. If Miranda were to principally define herself as Ferdinand’s victim, if she developed the sort of subservient mentality that he would like to see in her, there might still be a strong case for condemning the book as an example of male objectification. But Miranda is surprisingly indifferent to the person of Ferdinand. Indeed, she’s quite contemptuous of him as a non-entity; she loathes his utter lack of aesthetics. The second part of the book hinges not so much on Miranda’s struggle for her freedom as her attempts to come to terms with her own identity as an artist. Her thoughts are characterized by the anxiety and self-absorption typical of any young artist, but as Miranda’s situation becomes direr it becomes clear that her real struggle is to move as quickly as possible away from her naiveté, to face the fact of her own limitations and come to terms with the facts of her own mortality without the luxury of the slow, ideal ripening processes that most souls in liberty would hope to enjoy.
The Wikipedia entry on this book describes Miranda as a snob. Is she really? Certainly, she’s aware that she’s been trained to look down on Ferdinand for his bluntness of wit and lack of education. But there’s also a deep welling of sympathy in her, an impetus to find redeeming qualities even in her captor.
John Fowles made no secret that he was an elitist, and our young critic eager for a cause to condemn this book might be torn between which character is the more worthy of the reader’s contempt. Does Ferdinand represent the ruling gender elite, or does Miranda represent the ruling cultural elite?
I think the central virtue in Fowles is that he realized the great potential in wandering into this sort of philosophical briar patch. He recognizes the almost visceral need of the reader to rush toward judgment, and he uses it as an engine for his own narrative tension. In some ways, this is a silly book, a little too obvious, with too many heavy-handed references to The Tempest and too much focus on Miranda’s mentor G.P. (Gentle Prospero?) a curmudgeonly and lecherous artist who’s enigmatic pronouncements are not nearly so profound as Fowles thinks they are. But I would strongly recommend this book to anyone who wants to see how paradox and uncertainty can bring a novel to life, and how the fundamental challenge to any reader is to withhold judgment enough that it’s possible to listen to what’s really being said.
Reviewed 21 October 2008
I decided to change my reading habits a little. Normally, I try to read switch directions as often as possible, to jump from classical to contemporary authors, from fiction to nonfiction and so on as often as possible. But I decided to see what it would be like to focus on one author whom I like a lot. After being so bowled over last year by The Magus, I decided to go back to John Fowles and find out what else he’s written.
The Collector is a book whose subject is so dark—it tells the story the kidnapping of a girl by a young man with a distinctly bland set of sociopathic tendencies—that it’s hard to say “Oh, I just love that book” without depicting oneself as something of a pervert.
While the scenario itself has all the lurid elements of captivity and depravity that are celebrated today in the mythology built up around Hannibal Lecter or the Saw series of movies, it’s notable that there are no scenes of outright torture in this book. The kidnapper, who adopts the false name Ferdinand, goes out of his way to create a comfortable environment for his captive. Does that mitigate his crime or does it serve rather to underscore the fact that no amount of comfort can serve as compensation for the crime of depriving an innocent of her freedom.
There’s something essentially acidic in John Fowles. I think he knew deep down the strident, judgmental direction that literary criticism was headed in, the way that young students especially are encouraged to condemn first and foremost to condemn the author. I think that at some level the sly and Machiavellian Fowles not only anticipated this trend, but he also decided quite deliberately in this, his first published novel, to offer himself up as a sort of intentional sacrifice, and then to profit from the confusion of those who would condemn him.
The first knee-jerk reaction of today’s critic would be to condemn Fowles for writing the ultimate puerile male fantasy novel, a masturbatory wish fulfillment of a man who seeks only to possess a woman, to own her as an object without ever recognizing her as a person.
The second part of the novel takes the form of the diary of “Ferdinand’s” captive Miranda. It is clear after only a short time that Miranda has a far greater claim to the author’s sympathies, and this must give the lie to the knee-jerk condemnation of the book laid out above. If Miranda were to principally define herself as Ferdinand’s victim, if she developed the sort of subservient mentality that he would like to see in her, there might still be a strong case for condemning the book as an example of male objectification. But Miranda is surprisingly indifferent to the person of Ferdinand. Indeed, she’s quite contemptuous of him as a non-entity; she loathes his utter lack of aesthetics. The second part of the book hinges not so much on Miranda’s struggle for her freedom as her attempts to come to terms with her own identity as an artist. Her thoughts are characterized by the anxiety and self-absorption typical of any young artist, but as Miranda’s situation becomes direr it becomes clear that her real struggle is to move as quickly as possible away from her naiveté, to face the fact of her own limitations and come to terms with the facts of her own mortality without the luxury of the slow, ideal ripening processes that most souls in liberty would hope to enjoy.
The Wikipedia entry on this book describes Miranda as a snob. Is she really? Certainly, she’s aware that she’s been trained to look down on Ferdinand for his bluntness of wit and lack of education. But there’s also a deep welling of sympathy in her, an impetus to find redeeming qualities even in her captor.
John Fowles made no secret that he was an elitist, and our young critic eager for a cause to condemn this book might be torn between which character is the more worthy of the reader’s contempt. Does Ferdinand represent the ruling gender elite, or does Miranda represent the ruling cultural elite?
I think the central virtue in Fowles is that he realized the great potential in wandering into this sort of philosophical briar patch. He recognizes the almost visceral need of the reader to rush toward judgment, and he uses it as an engine for his own narrative tension. In some ways, this is a silly book, a little too obvious, with too many heavy-handed references to The Tempest and too much focus on Miranda’s mentor G.P. (Gentle Prospero?) a curmudgeonly and lecherous artist who’s enigmatic pronouncements are not nearly so profound as Fowles thinks they are. But I would strongly recommend this book to anyone who wants to see how paradox and uncertainty can bring a novel to life, and how the fundamental challenge to any reader is to withhold judgment enough that it’s possible to listen to what’s really being said.
Angels and Insects
by AS Byatt. (1992) Published by Chatto & Windus. 292 pages.
Reviewed 15 October 2008
Nobody can write about ideas the way the AS Byatt does. She allows the worlds of her stories to crystallize around the concepts and issues that she’s chosen to focus on, and this method is illustrated extremely well in the two novellas that sit side-by-side in this polished and successful work.
The first story, Morpho Eugenia, is focused on questions of evolution and creation. The tension between the two is not so much that of a two equal rivals going head-to-head. Rather, it’s the tension of the torch being passed somewhat unwillingly from an old, established sire and a young upstart. The story is that of the young scientist William Adamson who has found himself nearly destitute after losing most of the results from his recent expedition to the Amazon. He gains quick patronage from the Alabaster family; the old patrician Harald wants to use Adamson as a sounding board for his idea about a book that argues the case for God’s existence even in a post-Darwin world. The discussions between the two men are civil, but around the edges of the debate all the more volatile elements of the subject seep their way into the story. As a suitor for Harald’s daughter Eugenia, Alabaster is faced with all the antipathy of a British class system in which wealthy and titled families are infatuated above all with themselves, with their own rituals and routines and the belief in their own innate superiority.
Reading this story, you can understand why, at the tail end of the Victorian Era, a thinker like GB Shaw became so interested in the idea of a “life force.” The world of the landed elite is a sort of shell, ornately beautiful, essentially dead. As William becomes more and more entangled in the world of the Alabasters, he seems to draw his vitality not from the desiccated culture at its core, but from the enthusiasm of those who exist at its edges, the children and servants who inspire William to undertake an engaging project of carefully studying and depicting the natural history of the ant colonies surrounding the Alabaster home.
The real “life-force” that’s breaking through here is essentially the imagination, the ability to create and connect with the world in a meaningful way. Although the world of the Alabasters offers all sorts of material comforts, full acceptance comes at a price of the ability to take part in the world in any creative way. At the same time as Adamson discovers the limitations of the Alabasters’ world, we the readers also discover a lot of the richness of the biological world he studies. This is especially brought out by Matty Crompton, a woman of uncertain status who lives with the Alabasters and serves often as the driving force behind Adamson’s endeavors. Crompton is fascinated by the myriad references to mythology that are woven into the nomenclature of species as assigned by Linnaeus, and she’s inspired by this to create a series of fables which illustrate the way that science in the 19th century really inherited the wealth of imaginative energy that had once been the domain of religion.
In the second story, Conjugal Angel, the situation is quite different. Here, instead of looking at an imaginative journey at its beginnings, we survey it from its end. The story is largely about the strange love triangle Alfred Lord Tennyson, the poet Laureate, his sister Emily, and the young genius Arthur Henry Hallam, who was engaged to Emily and who, after his untimely death from a brain hemorrhage, was immortalized by in Tennyson’s long poem In Memoriam A.H.H.
This is very familiar territory for anyone who’s read Byatt’s Possession. To me, this story is a lot harder to read than Morpho Eugenia, but also a lot more rewarding because Byatt is focusing on something she’s extremely passionate about: the connection we form over time with select handfuls of words, snatches of poetry, little remarks, epigrams and observations; the way that these are colored by the criticism and the prying curiosity of the coterie of scholars and biographers and enthusiasts who form a sort of cage around the world of literature. If Morpho Eugenia seemed to be set against a dazzling world of sunshine and picnic-weather, Conjugal Angel has been quite deliberately set in a world of gloom and encroaching night, and all the scientific wonder and clarity has been abandoned for the spooky Victorian fixation on the occult.
After making such a strong case for science in her first story, why does Byatt seem to betray herself by writing a story in which séance goers seems to commune with sinister spirits? I think this is a way of consciously affirming the fact that there is something unscientific and arcane about literature, something inherently backward looking and yet necessary, at least for those who can be moved by careful examination of words. The folks around the séance table are deeply engrossed in a world of Swedenborgian theories and occult associations that seem not so much profane or ludicrous as just hopelessly antique to us now, a system of belief that may be fascinating to us, but which we can’t imagine actually subscribing to and inhabiting. But in order to really understand literature at it’s core, Byatt argues, you have to be willing to reincarnate these ghost worlds, these old systems of sentiment and fashion, these old mores and compulsions that once defined the way that people thought. It requires a lot of patience to follow Byatt as she pries open the minds first of Emily Tennyson and then her brother Alfred, but as you go along you feel that you’re witnessing first hand the way a writer is truly able to enrich herself, to strengthen her arsenal and to use fiction as a way of learning the real purpose of how it is she’s chosen to invest the deepest of her passion.
Reviewed 15 October 2008
Nobody can write about ideas the way the AS Byatt does. She allows the worlds of her stories to crystallize around the concepts and issues that she’s chosen to focus on, and this method is illustrated extremely well in the two novellas that sit side-by-side in this polished and successful work.
The first story, Morpho Eugenia, is focused on questions of evolution and creation. The tension between the two is not so much that of a two equal rivals going head-to-head. Rather, it’s the tension of the torch being passed somewhat unwillingly from an old, established sire and a young upstart. The story is that of the young scientist William Adamson who has found himself nearly destitute after losing most of the results from his recent expedition to the Amazon. He gains quick patronage from the Alabaster family; the old patrician Harald wants to use Adamson as a sounding board for his idea about a book that argues the case for God’s existence even in a post-Darwin world. The discussions between the two men are civil, but around the edges of the debate all the more volatile elements of the subject seep their way into the story. As a suitor for Harald’s daughter Eugenia, Alabaster is faced with all the antipathy of a British class system in which wealthy and titled families are infatuated above all with themselves, with their own rituals and routines and the belief in their own innate superiority.
Reading this story, you can understand why, at the tail end of the Victorian Era, a thinker like GB Shaw became so interested in the idea of a “life force.” The world of the landed elite is a sort of shell, ornately beautiful, essentially dead. As William becomes more and more entangled in the world of the Alabasters, he seems to draw his vitality not from the desiccated culture at its core, but from the enthusiasm of those who exist at its edges, the children and servants who inspire William to undertake an engaging project of carefully studying and depicting the natural history of the ant colonies surrounding the Alabaster home.
The real “life-force” that’s breaking through here is essentially the imagination, the ability to create and connect with the world in a meaningful way. Although the world of the Alabasters offers all sorts of material comforts, full acceptance comes at a price of the ability to take part in the world in any creative way. At the same time as Adamson discovers the limitations of the Alabasters’ world, we the readers also discover a lot of the richness of the biological world he studies. This is especially brought out by Matty Crompton, a woman of uncertain status who lives with the Alabasters and serves often as the driving force behind Adamson’s endeavors. Crompton is fascinated by the myriad references to mythology that are woven into the nomenclature of species as assigned by Linnaeus, and she’s inspired by this to create a series of fables which illustrate the way that science in the 19th century really inherited the wealth of imaginative energy that had once been the domain of religion.
In the second story, Conjugal Angel, the situation is quite different. Here, instead of looking at an imaginative journey at its beginnings, we survey it from its end. The story is largely about the strange love triangle Alfred Lord Tennyson, the poet Laureate, his sister Emily, and the young genius Arthur Henry Hallam, who was engaged to Emily and who, after his untimely death from a brain hemorrhage, was immortalized by in Tennyson’s long poem In Memoriam A.H.H.
This is very familiar territory for anyone who’s read Byatt’s Possession. To me, this story is a lot harder to read than Morpho Eugenia, but also a lot more rewarding because Byatt is focusing on something she’s extremely passionate about: the connection we form over time with select handfuls of words, snatches of poetry, little remarks, epigrams and observations; the way that these are colored by the criticism and the prying curiosity of the coterie of scholars and biographers and enthusiasts who form a sort of cage around the world of literature. If Morpho Eugenia seemed to be set against a dazzling world of sunshine and picnic-weather, Conjugal Angel has been quite deliberately set in a world of gloom and encroaching night, and all the scientific wonder and clarity has been abandoned for the spooky Victorian fixation on the occult.
After making such a strong case for science in her first story, why does Byatt seem to betray herself by writing a story in which séance goers seems to commune with sinister spirits? I think this is a way of consciously affirming the fact that there is something unscientific and arcane about literature, something inherently backward looking and yet necessary, at least for those who can be moved by careful examination of words. The folks around the séance table are deeply engrossed in a world of Swedenborgian theories and occult associations that seem not so much profane or ludicrous as just hopelessly antique to us now, a system of belief that may be fascinating to us, but which we can’t imagine actually subscribing to and inhabiting. But in order to really understand literature at it’s core, Byatt argues, you have to be willing to reincarnate these ghost worlds, these old systems of sentiment and fashion, these old mores and compulsions that once defined the way that people thought. It requires a lot of patience to follow Byatt as she pries open the minds first of Emily Tennyson and then her brother Alfred, but as you go along you feel that you’re witnessing first hand the way a writer is truly able to enrich herself, to strengthen her arsenal and to use fiction as a way of learning the real purpose of how it is she’s chosen to invest the deepest of her passion.
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