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Book Cover for: Angels & Insects: Two Novellas, A. S. Byatt

Angels & Insects: Two Novellas

A. S. Byatt

These two fascinating novellas, like A. S. Byatt's Booker Prize-winning novel Possession, are set in the mid-nineteenth century, weaving fact and fiction, reality and romance. "Morpho Eugenia" is a lively Gothic fable of the Earthly Paradise, of the Victorian obsession with Darwinian theories of breeding and sexuality and the parallels between insect and human society - the capture and taming of nature, whether it be a young woman in a country house or a rare butterfly, gleaming in the forests of the Amazon. "The Conjugial Angel" concerns Tennyson's In Memoriam, published in 1850, mourning the death seventeen years before of his friend Arthur Henry Hallam, who was engaged to Tennyson's sister Emily. A philosophical ghost story, bizarre, comic, and moving, in which fictive mediums meet "real" characters, it explores the contemporary preoccupation with God and life after death. Resonant, magical, entirely original, this is A. S. Bryant at her best.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
  • Publish Date: Mar 29th, 1994
  • Pages: 352
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.00in - 5.22in - 0.72in - 0.72lb
  • EAN: 9780679751342
  • Categories: Historical - GeneralLiteraryVisionary & Metaphysical

About the Author

A. S. Byatt was the author of numerous novels, including The Children's Book, The Biographer's Tale, and Possession, which was awarded the Booker Prize. She also wrote two novellas, published together as Angels & Insects, five collections of short stories, and several works of nonfiction. A distinguished critic and author, and the recipient of the 2016 Erasmus Prize for her "inspiring contribution to 'life writing, '" she died in 2023.