Publication
Vintage Books (1992), 432 pages
Original publication date
1978
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Description
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.… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member janeajones
I think Angels and Insects is the only other A.S. Byatt novel I have read. I'm not quite sure why I have avoided her -- I'm a big fan of Margaret Drabble, her sister's work. And yes, I'm aware of the "estrangement" between the two.
That said, The Virgin in the Garden is the first of a quartet about
The year is 1952 -- Elizabeth II is about to be crowned, and England is in a frenzy of post-war celebration. Alexander Wedderburn, the second English Master, has been commissioned to write a verse drama, Astraea, chronicling the reign of Elizabeth I. The town, the countryside, and the wider theatre community are caught up into the production -- professional actors are brought in to play the leads, as locals and students play supporting roles. Frederica is cast as the young Elizabeth.
Mirth and mayhem ensue. Love and lust are in the air -- as are literature and alchemical experiments. The novel is full of allusions to Elizabethan history and English literature, as well as the social mores of the 1950s. Byatt certainly exploits her academic background. I found the novel at once humorously satirical and darkly ironic. The ending is a bit of a cliffhanger -- obviously she had sequels in mind.
That said, The Virgin in the Garden is the first of a quartet about
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Frederica Potter -- here an extremely bright young girl of 17 readying to take her A levels and looking forward to a brilliant university career at Oxford or Cambridge. She's the second child in an academic family. Her father, Bill Potter, a careless, hot-headed English Master, teaches at a local boys' school in Yorkshire. He considers that Stephanie, Frederica's elder sister, is wasting her university degree by teaching at the local girls' school. The youngest child, Marcus, is terrified of his father, withdrawn, and sees the world in visual patterns (in current terms he probably has Asberger's syndrome). Mother Winifred desperately tries to hold the family together.The year is 1952 -- Elizabeth II is about to be crowned, and England is in a frenzy of post-war celebration. Alexander Wedderburn, the second English Master, has been commissioned to write a verse drama, Astraea, chronicling the reign of Elizabeth I. The town, the countryside, and the wider theatre community are caught up into the production -- professional actors are brought in to play the leads, as locals and students play supporting roles. Frederica is cast as the young Elizabeth.
Mirth and mayhem ensue. Love and lust are in the air -- as are literature and alchemical experiments. The novel is full of allusions to Elizabethan history and English literature, as well as the social mores of the 1950s. Byatt certainly exploits her academic background. I found the novel at once humorously satirical and darkly ironic. The ending is a bit of a cliffhanger -- obviously she had sequels in mind.
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LibraryThing member dartmoor
A wonderful novel that is beautifuly written. This is the first in the quartet and none of the novels have disappointed me- the world of Frederica and her family is compelling and consuming- read them all!
LibraryThing member jmoncton
4 stars for beautiful descriptive prose, but 2 stars for 'what was the point of this book?' The story centers around a cast of characters that are putting on a play about the life of Queen Elizabeth I - the Virgin queen. And it's important that she is called the 'Virgin' Queen because much of this
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book is focused on different characters trying to lose their virginity or deflower as many virgins as possible. This book was sometimes pleasant to read, occasionally humorous, but at the end, left me with that incomplete feeling of coming to the end of a journey. It is the first of a 4 part series, so possibly I need to read the other 3 to understand the purpose of the book ... not sure if I'm up for that right now. Show Less
LibraryThing member iayork
A.S. Byatt does it once again!: This is one of the best literary works I have read. I cannot fathom the bad reviews here. The story of the eccentric Potter family and the quirky works of their minds enthralled me from beginning to end. Frederica Potter is my favorite character in the book. She
This novel's setting floored me. Fifties Britain is described in such a way that made me feel as though I had been alive during those times. The Elizabethan backdrop is also mesmerizing. And I love the quirkiness and darkness in this book. A.S. Byatt is no doubt one of the best writers of this era. Hers is a voice you cannot help but love. She writes with beautiful prose. I have read her short-story collections and now this book and I cannot wait to read her other works. I cannot recommend The Virgin in the Garden enough.
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takes me back to heroines made famous by authors the like of Jane Austen. She is one of the most colorful characters I have ever read. All of the central characters are great. This novel chronicles the life of an eccentric family with subtle magic realism and palpable dark language. This novel's setting floored me. Fifties Britain is described in such a way that made me feel as though I had been alive during those times. The Elizabethan backdrop is also mesmerizing. And I love the quirkiness and darkness in this book. A.S. Byatt is no doubt one of the best writers of this era. Hers is a voice you cannot help but love. She writes with beautiful prose. I have read her short-story collections and now this book and I cannot wait to read her other works. I cannot recommend The Virgin in the Garden enough.
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LibraryThing member janglen
I gave up on this half way through as it required more concentration than I was able to give it. It is beautifully written but the literary style meant I found it difficult to read in the odd snatches of time that were available. I will go back to it.
LibraryThing member astrologerjenny
I found this book pretentious, at least until I got used to the writer's style. The novel takes place in a British academic setting in the 1950s, and it assumes a good working knowledge of Latin, mythology, British history, etc.
After a while, I ceased to be annoyed by obscure references and became
Her characters live in a very rarified world, and often seem quite emotionally detached. Byatt does her best with them when they are alone, but often backs away from them when they’re interacting with each other.
The writing is well-honed but never really inspiring. In one romantic scene, the two main characters - a playwright and a young student - are talking about Racine. At one point, they congratulate each other on their ability to be romantically stimulated by French classical poetry. This is Byatt’s main flaw, her tendency to be too self-conscious. But there are also many beautiful passages, when she leaves herself out of the equation and sets her scenes with concentrated skill and care.
After a while, I ceased to be annoyed by obscure references and became
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interested in the characters. Byatt does a good job of following them around, allowing them their contradictions, depicting their emotional landscapes without explaining too much. Her characters live in a very rarified world, and often seem quite emotionally detached. Byatt does her best with them when they are alone, but often backs away from them when they’re interacting with each other.
The writing is well-honed but never really inspiring. In one romantic scene, the two main characters - a playwright and a young student - are talking about Racine. At one point, they congratulate each other on their ability to be romantically stimulated by French classical poetry. This is Byatt’s main flaw, her tendency to be too self-conscious. But there are also many beautiful passages, when she leaves herself out of the equation and sets her scenes with concentrated skill and care.
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LibraryThing member KarenRinn
verbose, loquacious, archaic - have a dictionary handy for the outmoded word use. Otherwise, an entertaining book.
LibraryThing member Marse
I read this book years ago, after finishing and loving Byatt's "Possession". I can barely remember most of it, but I do remember something about theater school and the main character's autistic brother--the only interesting character to me. The book felt overly dense. When I think about it,
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"Possession" was dense too, but somehow I didn't notice it when I read that novel, probably because I was in the thick of graduate school studying, you guessed it, literature. Maybe if I had been equally as interested in going to school for a theater degree, I would have loved this book too. Oh well. Show Less
LibraryThing member jonfaith
I read this one in Chicago and was rather impressed with the juggling of perspectives and the sweeping use of the Jubilee and Elizabeth I throughout. Dovetailing erudion and emotional awkwardness made this a definite success.
LibraryThing member thorold
This is (in part) another novel about a clever adolescent setting out into the unknown world of adult life, the first of four novels Byatt wrote, over a period of 25 years, about the character Frederica Potter. But it feels like a much more grown-up novel than The shadow of the sun and The game. It
The story is set in 1953, when Frederica is seventeen, but it's explicitly framed from the point of view of someone looking back from twenty years later, and thus able to comment with ironic distance on the short-lived "New Elizabethan" cultural enthusiasms of the Festival of Britain/Coronation period. (Oddly relevant again with the current British government trying to whip up enthusiasm for Mrs May's "Festival of Brexit"...). Most of the action is set around a fictional market town and a nearby small cathedral town in North Yorkshire — you could imagine them as Boroughbridge and Ripon, for instance, although Byatt is careful not to be too specific. And there are trips out to places like Knaresborough, Filey, Scarborough, Goathland and York to keep us in a Yorkshire mood.
At the centre of the plot is an outdoor production of Alexander Wedderburn's new verse-drama Astraea at a Yorkshire stately home, in which the schoolgirl Frederica has been chosen to play the young Elizabeth I. Frederica is madly in love with the romantic Alexander, but he's far too canny to get involved with a colleague's daughter, and it looks as though Frederica is going to have to make other arrangements to lose that which she has in common with the queen. Meanwhile, her elder sister Stephanie outrages their atheist/anarchist father by announcing that she intends to marry the curate, Daniel, and her younger brother Marcus becomes involved in dangerous-sounding telepathic experiments with the sinister Lucas, whose obvious derangement seems to have gone unobserved only because no-one expects biology teachers to be even slightly normal.
There's a huge amount of interesting stuff going on, with lots of characteristic Byatt themes: the irascible father, Bill, who feels trapped in the persona of "scary political ranter" that he has created for himself; the angry young man, Daniel, who has gone into the church with a great deal of energy but without any obvious religious conviction because it was the first way that offered itself to escape from his stultifying working-class childhood and narrow-minded mother; Stephanie, choosing family life with Daniel over the possibility of continuing her academic life; Marcus, subject to hyper-realistic creative visions and unsure what to do with them; and so on. And there's the interesting and detailed story of how the play comes together out of Alexander's gifted creative opportunism, the magus-like powers of Crowe, owner of the stately home and producer of the show, Frederica's fiery naivety, and the cynical pragmatism of the professional actors and director. And any number of parallels between Frederica, Elizabeth I, and the tiny flickering image of Elizabeth II on the TV screens. And a few Yorkshire in-jokes, like the way Lucas talks about tapping into the powerful "radiation" from the prehistoric cairns on Fylingdales Moor — which we know, but he doesn't, will become the site of a secretive high-powered Cold War radar installation in the 1960s.
I don't think the story manages to move outside the "1950s as seen from the 1970s" frame and bring the (Old) Elizabethans to life, though: we don't really get any closer to them than their written words as performed on stage. So that side of the book does tend to feel a bit more like academic criticism than a novel. But the imagining of the strange world of the early 1950s in England works very well.
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has the kind of scale and ambition that invites you to compare it with Middlemarch and South Riding — more especially since, like the latter, it's set in a lightly-fictionalised part of Yorkshire. Dozens of characters, four or five intertwined plot lines, lots of scenery, religion, politics, literary analysis, art-history, and all the rest. The story is set in 1953, when Frederica is seventeen, but it's explicitly framed from the point of view of someone looking back from twenty years later, and thus able to comment with ironic distance on the short-lived "New Elizabethan" cultural enthusiasms of the Festival of Britain/Coronation period. (Oddly relevant again with the current British government trying to whip up enthusiasm for Mrs May's "Festival of Brexit"...). Most of the action is set around a fictional market town and a nearby small cathedral town in North Yorkshire — you could imagine them as Boroughbridge and Ripon, for instance, although Byatt is careful not to be too specific. And there are trips out to places like Knaresborough, Filey, Scarborough, Goathland and York to keep us in a Yorkshire mood.
At the centre of the plot is an outdoor production of Alexander Wedderburn's new verse-drama Astraea at a Yorkshire stately home, in which the schoolgirl Frederica has been chosen to play the young Elizabeth I. Frederica is madly in love with the romantic Alexander, but he's far too canny to get involved with a colleague's daughter, and it looks as though Frederica is going to have to make other arrangements to lose that which she has in common with the queen. Meanwhile, her elder sister Stephanie outrages their atheist/anarchist father by announcing that she intends to marry the curate, Daniel, and her younger brother Marcus becomes involved in dangerous-sounding telepathic experiments with the sinister Lucas, whose obvious derangement seems to have gone unobserved only because no-one expects biology teachers to be even slightly normal.
There's a huge amount of interesting stuff going on, with lots of characteristic Byatt themes: the irascible father, Bill, who feels trapped in the persona of "scary political ranter" that he has created for himself; the angry young man, Daniel, who has gone into the church with a great deal of energy but without any obvious religious conviction because it was the first way that offered itself to escape from his stultifying working-class childhood and narrow-minded mother; Stephanie, choosing family life with Daniel over the possibility of continuing her academic life; Marcus, subject to hyper-realistic creative visions and unsure what to do with them; and so on. And there's the interesting and detailed story of how the play comes together out of Alexander's gifted creative opportunism, the magus-like powers of Crowe, owner of the stately home and producer of the show, Frederica's fiery naivety, and the cynical pragmatism of the professional actors and director. And any number of parallels between Frederica, Elizabeth I, and the tiny flickering image of Elizabeth II on the TV screens. And a few Yorkshire in-jokes, like the way Lucas talks about tapping into the powerful "radiation" from the prehistoric cairns on Fylingdales Moor — which we know, but he doesn't, will become the site of a secretive high-powered Cold War radar installation in the 1960s.
I don't think the story manages to move outside the "1950s as seen from the 1970s" frame and bring the (Old) Elizabethans to life, though: we don't really get any closer to them than their written words as performed on stage. So that side of the book does tend to feel a bit more like academic criticism than a novel. But the imagining of the strange world of the early 1950s in England works very well.
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LibraryThing member japaul22
This is my first attempt at reading Byatt and I'm honestly not sure what I thought. I liked it, but there were definitely aspects of the book that I didn't connect with. This is a hard book to describe. It's basically a family drama and is the first of a series of four books following the Potter
First the positives - I very much enjoyed Byatt's style. She has a beautiful way of describing setting. She also strikes a good balance between wordy description and succinct characterizations. I think she's brilliant at choosing the right way to describe each setting, character and event either in a long, drawn-out way or in one sentence. That was neat. It's also rare that I like a book in which I pretty much hate every character, but somehow she did it even though it did detract from my overall enjoyment of the book.
The negatives would be, again, that I didn't really like any of the characters. Everyone was very immature and had terrible judgment. Also, there were a lot of people almost having sex and that was annoying. I felt like screaming either do it or leave each other alone !!!! to almost every character. Also, one of the characters, Marcus, who is the brother of Frederica Potter is either a genius or crazy and befriends a seriously crazy teacher. There are lots of chapters about these strange metaphysical ideas that they have that I found pretty boring to read.
So, overall I liked Byatt's writing without particularly liking this book. I'm curious to try Possession since I've heard great things about it, but I'm not sure I'll continue with this 4 book series.
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family, specifically Frederica Potter. But then again, the family drama description doesn't work too well, because the family rarely interacts. The entire book is a flashback from the early 70s to 1953, the year of Elizabeth II's coronation. This event and the production of a play written by one of the main characters about the reign of Elizabeth I frame the novel.First the positives - I very much enjoyed Byatt's style. She has a beautiful way of describing setting. She also strikes a good balance between wordy description and succinct characterizations. I think she's brilliant at choosing the right way to describe each setting, character and event either in a long, drawn-out way or in one sentence. That was neat. It's also rare that I like a book in which I pretty much hate every character, but somehow she did it even though it did detract from my overall enjoyment of the book.
The negatives would be, again, that I didn't really like any of the characters. Everyone was very immature and had terrible judgment. Also, there were a lot of people almost having sex and that was annoying. I felt like screaming either do it or leave each other alone !!!! to almost every character. Also, one of the characters, Marcus, who is the brother of Frederica Potter is either a genius or crazy and befriends a seriously crazy teacher. There are lots of chapters about these strange metaphysical ideas that they have that I found pretty boring to read.
So, overall I liked Byatt's writing without particularly liking this book. I'm curious to try Possession since I've heard great things about it, but I'm not sure I'll continue with this 4 book series.
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LibraryThing member brakketh
Engaging and interesting characters - I'm hooked and making my way through the remainder of the quartet.
Media reviews
The virgin in the garden is set in North Yorkshire in 1952-3, Coronation Year. The plot concerns the Festival production of a play about Elizabeth I, allowing consideration of that period and of the problems of modern poetic language. The underlying theme is of metamorphosis, birth and death. There
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is social history as a record of the 1950s; treatment of one character involves the problems of the graduate housewife. Show Less
Language
Original language
English
ISBN
9780679738299
Physical description
432 p.; 5.2 inches
Pages
432