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Passions Of The Mind

Passions Of The Mind

Selected Writings

Summary

In Passions of the Mind, A.S. Byatt writes as an artist and scholar taking the reader on a journey of discovery as she explores the ideas, images and attitudes to language underpinning some of her own fiction, and also the work of Great Victorians and a varied range of twentieth-century women writers.

Fascinated by the coincidence of the symbolic and real which she finds in her favourite writers – Robert Browning, George Eliot and Wallace Stevens – A.S. Byatt also celebrates this quality in the sun and shadows of Van Gogh's painting.

Reviews

  • The great merit of Byatt's writing - fiction and essays - is that it continually engages the reader's mind... an enriching book, full of essays to which I expect to find myself returning again and again
    Allan Massie, Daily Telegraph

About the author

A. S. Byatt

A.S. Byatt (1936-2023) was a novelist, short-story writer and critic of international renown. Her novels include Possession (winner of the Booker Prize 1990), the Frederica Quartet and The Children’s Book, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. She was appointed CBE in 1990 and DBE in 1999, and was awarded the Erasmus Prize 2016 for her ‘inspiring contribution to life writing’ and the Pak Kyongni Prize 2017. In 2018 she received the Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award.
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