In this innovative and wide-ranging book, Byatt and the psychoanalyst Ignes Sodre bring their different sensibilities to bear on six novels they have read and loved: Jane Austen's <i>Mansfield Park</i>, Bronte's <i>Villette</i>, George Elliot's <i>Daniel Deronda</i>, Willa Cather's <i>The Professor's House</i>, Iris Murdoch's <i>An Unofficial Rose</i>, and Toni Morrison's <i>Beloved</i>. The results are nothing less than an education in the ways literature grips its readers and, at times, transforms their lives. <i>Imagining Characters</i> is indispensable, a work of criticism that returns us to the books it discusses with renewed respect and wonder.
