So there’s Frederica and Stephanie – the two daughters in this book – both kind of cerebral in their own way. Sex is not always easy, or grasp-able to certain types – although the desire is usually present in every human.
She writes about cerebral people, intellectuals, to some extent cut off from their own bodies – this is her topic.
In a funny way, nobody writes about sex like AS Byatt. Another one of Byatt’s main themes (this, I believe, is the thing I found most piercingly wonderful in Possession, the thing that spoke to me the most) is the split between the cerebral and the earthy. There is a cynicism in the era – a kind of dichotomy between the brou-haha of the upcoming coronation (and all its sincerity – you know, there’s no ironic distance in a coronation, no wink-wink at the audience), and all of the shining expectations of what this new age will bring for the British Empire – and the snarkiness going on below in the populace. Virgin in the Garden is really ABOUT England. What is it to be English? What is culture? Is it something to be inherited? Is how we speak directly influenced by, say, Chaucer? Shakespeare? Byatt revisits these themes again and again in her books ( Possession is all about that). We follow Bill (the father), and Stephanie, Frederica and Marcus (the children) through their lives – but all the time, they are grappling with big questions and issues. The play is to be put on at a private school – and the headmaster and his family (3 kids) are the main characters of Byatt’s book. Drawing parallels between that age and the “new” age.
A young playwright/academic has written a new play, in honor of the occasion of the coronation – and if I recall correctly it’s in verse, and it’s about Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen. The book takes place in 1952, in England – the time of Elizabeth’s coronation – seen as “the new Elizabethan age”. This is Byatt’s third novel – and actually, she has gone on to write three more books about this particular family, so there was obviously something here that gripped her.
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