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.