Overview

In Yorkshire, the Potter family are preparing to celebrate Elizabeth II’s arrival on the throne. Its three youngest members, however, are preoccupied with other matters. Stephanie has grown tired of their overbearing father and resolves to marry the local curate. Anxious teenager Marcus gains a new teacher and suffers increasingly disturbing visions. Then there is Frederica. On the brink of adulthood, a love affair with a young playwright may offer the freedom she desperately desires. The Virgin in the Garden is the first novel to feature Frederica Potter, and the beginning of a triumphant quartet of novels. Set in Yorkshire in 1952 as the inhabitants of the area set about celebrating the accession of a new Queen, this is the tale of a brilliant and eccentric family fatefully divided. The Virgin in the Garden is a wonderfully entertaining novel, in which enlightenment and sexuality, Elizabethan drama and comedy intersect richly and unpredictably.

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Reviews

'An ambitious novel [whose] narrative everywhere displays knowledge and intelligence.' -- The Times Literary Supplement 'Comic, well plotted, immensely touching ... Gaudy excitement and splendour.' -- The Times 'Byatt is essentially a fine, careful and very traditional storyteller.' -- The New York Times

Author Information

A.S. Byatt is internationally known as a novelist, short-story writer and critic. Her novels include Possession (winner of the Booker Prize in 1990), and the quartet of The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower and A Whistling Woman, as well as The Shadow of the Sun, The Game and The Biographer's Tale. Her latest novel, The Children's Book, is shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2009. She is also the author of two novellas, published together as Angels and Insects, and four collections of stories, and has co-edited Memory: An Anthology. Educated at York and Newnham College, Cambridge, she taught at the Central School of Art and Design, and was Senior Lecturer in English at University College, London, before becoming a full-time writer in 1983. She was appointed CBE in 1990 and DBE in 1999. Sophie Aldred was born in Greenwich, England and brought up in Blackheath, South East London. She studied drama at university and spent time with children’s drama companies in small productions before she became Ace in the immensely popular Doctor Who in 1987. Aldred has had a varied and busy television career in children’s programming, as a voiceover artist for television advertisements and providing voices for animated series such as Bob the Builder, Sergeant Stripes and Dennis and Gnasher.

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