![]() Byatt – even if subsequent novels have shown her giving up the same dissertation (on 17th-century religious metaphor) that her creator abandoned, or spending some time, as Byatt herself did, teaching literature to art students in London. You will think differently, he tells her, ‘when you decide to be a lady novelist, and get set to write a long novel by Proust out of George Eliot, and it won’t get up and walk.’ The author of The Virgin in the Garden was also 17 in 1953, but Frederica Potter is not A.S. ![]() ![]() Though the 17-year-old Frederica insists that ‘a form is as good as the writer who chooses it,’ the slightly older and more sophisticated Edmund Wilkie is sceptical. The year is 1953, and the immediate occasion is the staging of a verse drama in the manner of Eliot and Fry but the debate quickly turns to Frederica Potter’s own hypothetical future as a writer. ![]() Byatt’s first novel about the Potter family, The Virgin in the Garden (1978), the heroine and a clever friend debate the question of whether modern life has rendered some literary forms obsolete. ![]()
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