Passions of the Mind

The Booker Prize-winning author of Possession and a novelist of “dazzling inventiveness” ( Time ) delivers a stunning collection of essays on literature and life.   Whether she is writing about George Eliot or Sylvia Plath; Victorian spiritual malaise or Toni Morrison; mythic strands in the novels of Iris Murdoch and Saul Bellow; politics behind the popularity of Barbara Pym or the ambitions that underlie her own fiction, Byatt manages to be challenging, entertaining, and unflinchingly