Imagining Characters: Six Conversations About Women Writers: Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Willa Cather, Iris Murdoch, and Toni Morrison

by A.S. Byatt, Ignes Sodre

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 Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, Bronte'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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Feminism, Writing, Literary Criticism, Books About Books, Essays, Womens

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

A.S. Byatt (Antonia Susan Byatt) is internationally known for her novels and short stories. Her novels include the Booker Prize winner Possession, The Biographer’s Tale and the quartet, The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower and A Whistling Woman, and her highly acclaimed collections of short stories include Sugar and Other Stories, The Matisse Stories, The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye, Elementals and her most recent book Little Black Book of Stories. A distinguished critic as well as a writer of fiction, A S Byatt was appointed CBE in 1990 and DBE in 1999.

BYATT, Dame Antonia (Susan), (Dame Antonia Duffy), DBE 1999 (CBE 1990); FRSL 1983; Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (France), 2003 , writer; born 24 Aug. 1936;

Daughter of His Honour John Frederick Drabble, QC and late Kathleen Marie Bloor

Byatt has famously been engaged in a long-running feud with her novelist sister, Margaret Drabble, over the alleged appropriation of a family tea-set in one of her novels. The pair seldom see each other and each does not read the books of the other.

Married
1st, 1959, Ian Charles Rayner Byatt (Sir I. C. R. Byatt) marriage dissolved. 1969; one daughter (one son deceased)
2nd, 1969, Peter John Duffy; two daughters.

Education
Sheffield High School; The Mount School, York; Newnham College, Cambridge (BA Hons; Hon. Fellow 1999); Bryn Mawr College, Philadelphia, USA; Somerville College, Oxford.

Academic Honours:
Hon. Fellow, London Inst., 2000; Fellow UCL, 2004
Hon. DLitt: Bradford, 1987; DUniv York, 1991; Durham, 1991; Nottingham, 1992; Liverpool, 1993; Portsmouth, 1994; London, 1995; Sheffield, 2000; Kent 2004; Hon. LittD Cambridge, 1999

Prizes
The PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Of Fiction prize, 1986 for STILL LIFE
The Booker Prize, 1990, for POSSESSION
Irish Times/Aer Lingus International Fiction Prize, 1990 for POSSESSION
The Eurasian section of Best Book in Commonwealth Prize, 1991 for POSSESSION
Premio Malaparte, Capri, 1995;
Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature, California, 1998 for THE DJINN IN THE NIGHTINGALE''S EYE
Shakespeare Prize, Toepfer Foundation, Hamburg, 2002;

Publications:
The Shadow of the Sun, 1964;
Degrees of Freedom, 1965 (reprinted as Degrees of Freedom: the early novels of Iris Murdoch, 1994);
The Game, 1967;
Wordsworth and Coleridge in their Time, 1970 (reprinted as Unruly Times: Wordsworth and Coleridge in their Time, 1989);
Iris Murdoch 1976
The Virgin in the Garden, 1978;
GEORGE ELIOT Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings , 1979 (editor);
Still Life, 1985
Sugar and Other Stories, 1987;
George Eliot: selected essays, 1989 (editor)
Possession: a romance, 1990
Robert Browning''s Dramatic Monologues, 1990 (editor);
Passions of the Mind, (essays), 1991;
Angels and Insects (novellas),1992
The Matisse Stories (short stories),1993;
The Djinn in the Nightingale''s Eye: five fairy stories, 1994
Imagining Characters, 1995 (joint editor);
New Writing 4, 1995 (joint editor);
Babel Tower, 1996;
New Writing 6, 1997 (joint editor);
The Oxford Book of English Short Stories, 1998 (editor);
Elementals: Stories of fire and ice (short stories), 1998;
The Biographer''s Tale, 2000;
On Histories and Stories (essays), 2000;
Portraits in Fiction, 2001;
The Bird Hand Book, 2001 (Photographs by Victor Schrager Text By AS Byatt);
A Whistling Woman, 2002
Little

Reviews

[Chanson Vanessa · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is one of the best and most readable Literary Criticism pieces I've ever come across with. The conversation being between two women, it goes without saying that the feminist undertow figures strongly. Nothing radical is presented, at least not the in-your-face kind, although for female readers, the seemingly innocuous ideas would rightly come across as stronger than they would the casual (read: male--no offense meant) reader.

In a nutshell, the two authors discuss books written by women, giving them a motley richness of readings--mythical, biographical, archetypal, psychoanalytic, structuralist, feminist, etc. Some of the pieces they discussed (and the ones I liked best) were George Eliot's Daniel Deronda , Charlotte Bronte's Villette and Toni Morrisson's Beloved.

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a lot of fun -- like listening in on extraordinarily erudite gossip about fictional characters.

[Kirk]

I only read the conversation on Mansfield Park. Tedious.

[Carol · Rating 5 out of 5]

In October 1992, both A. B. Byatt and Ignes Sodre were attending the Cheltenham Festival of Literature. Byatt, known as one of Britian's leading novelists/critic and Sodre, a Brazilian psychoanalyst who practiced in England for the thirty years, conversed over their love of literature and and a deep interest in human development. After each spoke, they thought there might be a possibility of a book. And they worked together to create this work of art. They choose six major texts from different periods in history -- from the 19th century with Jane Austen's Mansfield Park to Charlotte Bronte's Villette to George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, to Willa Cather's The Professor's House, to Iris Murdock's An Unofficial Rose, and to Toni Morrison's Beloved, ending with Dreams and Fictions.

Such an excellent book, I wish that A. S. Byatt and Ignes Sodre would also do more books similar to this one.

[Nicole Perkins · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was disappointed in this one. While Byatt and Sodre are unquestionably brilliant and their thoughts and insights incredibly valuable, I found this to be a very dry read. (And I am a fan of Austen, Bronte, Eliot, and Morrison)

[Walter Polashenski · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading great discussions of great books is exhilarating and inspiring and terrifying.

[Andrea · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have to be honest – I only read three of the six essays in this book because I've only read three of the six books these two are discussing – but they were enchanting. For anyone who has ever found themselves eavesdropping on other people's conversations in coffee shops, this book has that delicious feel of being a fly on the wall while far more interesting and knowledgeable people natter on. Both authors have done great prep and the "essays" are literally transcribed conversations with a minimum of editing. Interesting themes discussed and lots of personal impressions and feelings about the works, something I've always found lacking from high-brow lit crit. I plan to work through the other novels and check this book out of the library again to read along.

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

In the final section of this book – a rather interminable, and completely serious, discussion about dream interpretation, which is so 1995 of them – Sodre and Byatt explain that the choice of books to include was totally based on vibes. These are six of their favourite books, which explains why the connections between them are tenuous at best. I mainly picked this up because Mansfield Park is my favourite Austen and I will really read any piece of Austen literary critique I find (it’s thin on the ground compared to biographical stuff). Equally I like Villette, and have read Daniel Deronda. Owning this volume inspired me to read the three other books, of which the only one I liked was The Professor’s House; on the other hand, I bought two more Cathers on the back of it, so hopefully that works out well. I truly despised An Unofficial Rose, so it’s both funny and infuriating to see these women wasting their brainpower on it. Overall it was an interesting experience; I have a similar volume by Harold Bloom I haven’t read because again, I haven’t got around to reading all it covers, and another by FR Leavis, whose chapter on Eliot aggravated me by his constant repetition of ‘she’s good FOR A WOMAN’. Contrast Sodre and Byatt on this:

‘In novels by men about the relations between men and women, on the whole women are somehow expected to respond to masterfulness. In novels by women, on the whole, what they respond to is people observing their feelings, people treating them as people, people being kind.’

What was most interesting for me was how the discussion of these books inspired thoughts on the craft of writing itself. Byatt is quite insistent on the concept of The Work, which I appreciate. Also the value of solitude, and the questionable value of having a family life to distract you.

‘[Eliot] said, if you renounce something for virtuous reasons, you are not compensated for that renunciation. If you give something up, you give it up. And you become the person who has given that up. If you are virtuous, virtue doesn’t bring any rewards other than being virtuous.’

‘Daniel Deronda moved me much more than most novels about artists because it did include the work. You can’t be a good artist if you don’t have a craft. It can’t just be inspiration. It has to be something technical that you can really do.’

‘But his wife and children and sons-in-law are somehow stopping him having this sense of what it is to be human. Now I know this feeling myself well enough to know that Willa Cather hadn’t invented it. It’s deep in our nature.’

Cather: ‘There were other crusades many centuries ago when all the good men who were otherwise unemployed, and their wives and progeny, set out for Palestine. But they found that the holy sepulchre was a long way off, and there was no beaten path thereto, and the mountains were high and the sands hot, and the waters of the desert were bitter brine. So they decided to leave the journey to the pilgrims who were madmen anyway, without homes; who found the water no bitterer than their own tears and the desert sands no hotter than the burning hearts within them. In the kingdom of art there is no God but one God and his service is so exacting that there are few men born of woman who are strong enough to take the vows. There is no paradise offered for a reward to the faithful, no celestial bowers, no houris, no scented wines; only death and the truth.’

Murdoch: ‘Rilke said of Cezanne that he did not paint ‘I like it’, he painted ‘There it is’. This is not easy and requires, in art or morals, a discipline.[...] We see in mediocre art, where perhaps it is even more clearly seen than in mediocre conduct, the intrusion of fantasy, the assertion of self, the dimming of any reflection of the real world.’

I also like this point about modern university education – I always enjoyed most small-group discussion as well. And this was made long before pandemic-mandated virtual learning, before the Internet!

‘Writing lectures was one way of acquiring and ordering knowledge, but actually working something out with somebody, in conversation, was quite another thing, and equally valid. If I could change the universities now, I would abolish all the lectures, put them on video once and for all, and reinstitute seminars. If you don’t discuss, you don’t understand.’

[John Of Oxshott · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book popped up on my Goodreads pages after just a few weeks of joining the site, which I did to try and get some pointers to history books worth reading. I wasn't expecting something like this. I already have a long fiction list to work through. But I couldn't resist this one because Mansfield Park, Villette and An Unofficial Rose are three of my favourite books and I was already planning to read Daniel Deronda this year. I will carve out some time for The Professor's House and Beloved because the quality of discussion in this book is so fine and stimulating that I want to re-read the books I already know, or thought I knew, alongside the ones that are new to me and read these conversations again.

There is a bit of synchronicity here because I have been reading Iris Murdoch's early novels in sequence this year and I discovered through this book that A.S. Byatt has written another book about Iris Murdoch's early novels called Degrees of Freedom. I can't wait to read it.

I really like the format of Imagining Characters because each discussion is preceded by a summary of the novel. I write my own summaries but it is always helpful to see someone else's as we all focus on different things or encapsulate them in different terms and these help jog the memory for some of the foggier aspects of the novels under discussion. The conversations are very detailed and include many quotations or readings from the texts and from other commentaries.

Their enthusiasm and love of reading shines through in every sentence. Antonia Byatt in particular frequently refers to the feelings she first had as a young girl while reading these books. I find this very refreshing. The novels under discussion were real page-turners for me, which is one of the reasons I love them, but that thrill of reading is often forgotten when such books come under serious discussion by professional critics.

I studied Mansfield Park at university so I know it quite well but I gained some fresh insights from this discussion and at times I was quite awestruck by some of the things Antonia said. I had to read it very slowly, a few pages at a time, because I found it very dense and packed with ideas that I had to pause and think about.

Antonia Byatt has previously struck me as somewhat dry and intellectual and I suppose she is but I have certainly refined my opinion of her after reading this book. The only piece of fiction I've read by her is The Virgin in the Garden and that was a long time ago, so far in the mists of time that I can scarcely recall what made me buy it, but I still remember the impression it made on me, which was that she was incredibly clever and probably too clever for me to fully grasp what the novel was about. I see a more passionate and earthy side of her now and I am definitely going to check out more of her fiction very soon.

[MoonstruckJules (Giulia) · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars!

[Michele Larrow]

Read about 2/3 of the book

[Jenniffer]

I have to read a few more of the novels discussed in the essays(6 I think). I have never read any George Elliot or Jane Austin(I know I should be beaten.)So it will be awhile before this moves to the read shelf.

[Meg · Rating 5 out of 5]

...if only because it came in ridiculously handy when I was asked to give a paper on Women's Lit. ;)

[Ellen Marcolongo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Makes me want to read (or re-read) these great women writers. The authors delve deeply into each author & each character they created.

[Elizabeth · Rating 1 out of 5]

wear on cover; $3.99