Imagining Characters

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.