Imagining Characters: Six Conversations about Women Writers

Analysts and novelists are both concerned with our innermost thoughts and feelings. Does their reading of fiction differ or overlap? In this book, British novelist A.S. Byatt meets Ignes Sodre, a Brazilian psychoanalyst, to discuss six great novels by six female novelists: Mansfield Park by Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte's Villette, Daniel Deronda by George Eliot, The Professor's House by Willa Cather, Iris Murdoch's An Unofficial Rose and Beloved by Toni Morrison. As they explore the subtleties of each book, they reveal that a writer's creativity is linked not only to structures of the family and society, but to the mysteries of dreams, fantasy and metaphor.