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This book offers the fruits of a learned and immensely lively collaboration between the novelist and literary critic, A.S. Byatt, and the psychoanalyst Ignês Sodré. Byatt's literary exploration of unconscious processes will be known to readers of her novel
Possession, a story which unravels the impact of unconsious projective identification. Sodré's clinical insight and passion for literature make for a splendid pair of minds at work. The two met to talk over six classic novels by women writers, and their dialogue centres on the characters and relationships explored in their chosen texts.
The novels they selected were intended to span the whole period of great novel-writing, and to provide aní pportunity for reflection on cultural and hsitorical themes, as well as the exploration of character. They offer a reading of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, Charlotte Bronte's Villette, George Elliot's Daniel Deronda, Willa Cather's The Professor's House, Iris Murdoch's An Unofficial Rose and Toni Morrison's Beloved. A final chapter discusses the relationship between ‘Dreams and Fictions’, and describes their understanding of each other's approach to literature. They share a fasciantion with the human mind's need for fictions, and a belief in the importance of the distinction between defensive day-dreaming and the psychic work of both dreamers and writers. Dreams and works of art are seeen as both representing aspects of the internal world in symbolic form. Their dialogue addresses Byatt's experience of herself as a reader and writer of fiction and some of the similarities between the analytic couple and the writer/reader dyad. Their immense enjoyment of the books they talked about, and of each other's ideas, offers a delightful backdrop to the challenge of what they have to say.
The book is not an easy one to review, since appreciating the intricate and absorbing details of their conversations depends on a good knowledge of the works concerned. As an enthusiastic reader of nov