Imagining Characters: Six Conversations about Women Writers: Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, George Eli Ot, Willa Cather, Iris Murdoch, and T, Paperback/A. S. Byatt

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 , 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. About the Author: A.S. Byatt is the author of the novels Possession (winner of the Booker Prize in 1990), The Game , and the sequence The Virgin in the Garden , Still Life , and Babel Tower . She has also written two novellas, published together as Angels and Insects , and four collections of shorter works, including The Matisse Stories and The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye . Educated at Cambridge, she was a senior lecturer in English at University College, London, before becoming a full-time writer in 1983. A distinguished critic as well as a novelist, she lives in London.