ANGELS & INSECTS-FILM TIE-IN E - Softcover

Byatt, A.S.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099591812 ISBN 13: 9780099591818

Publisher: Random House UK, 1996

Synopsis

These two novellas, MORPHO EUGENIA and THE CONJUGIAL ANGEL, 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 CONJUGIAL ANGEL, a philosophical ghost-story concerns Tennyson's IN MEMORIAM, published in 1850, mourning the death of his friend Arthur Hallam.

About this title

About the Author

A.S. Byatt is the author of the novels Possession (winner of the Booker Prize in 1990), The Game, and the sequence The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, and Babel Tower. She has also written two novellas, published together as Angels and Insects, and four collections of shorter works, including The Matisse Stories and The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye. Educated at Cambridge, she was a senior lecturer in English at University College, London, before becoming a full-time writer in 1983. A distinguished critic as well as a novelist, she lives in London.

From Kirkus Reviews

Two postmodern novellas with Victorian themes that have all the leaden scholarly pretension of that era--and none of the leavening irony that made Byatt's bestselling Possession (1990) so successful a mix of erudition and wit. Taking two intellectually incompatible ideas--Darwinism and spiritualism--of the period, Byatt then sets them up in their quintessential Victorian settings, where they are observed, illustrated, and dissected like the insect specimens of the first novella and found to signify not very much, despite quotes from the greats and the Bible. In ``Morpho Eugenia,'' impoverished naturalist William Adamson, homeward bound from insect-hunting in South America, is employed by a wealthy clergyman-scholar who's trying to write a book that will reconcile his religious beliefs with his scientific interests. Adamson soon falls in love with the clergyman's daughter, the beautiful Eugenia, whom he marries only to find that her behavior is eerily similar to that of some of the insects he's been studying with the help of governess Matty. With the proceeds from his book on ants, Adamson then heads off with Matty to South America, cheered by their sea captain's thought for the day: ``That is the main thing--to be alive.'' The widow of this same captain is one of the protagonists of ``The Conjugal Angel,'' in which a group holds weekly s‚ances where she is medium. They meet in the home of Captain Jesse and his wife Emily, Alfred Tennyson's sister and once the fianc‚e of the beloved Arthur Hallam, to whom the poet dedicated that great Victorian icon ``In Memoriam.'' All of which means a great deal of poetry quoted, a great number of spirits consulted, and much speculation about just what Alfred really felt for Arthur--as well as an abrupt ending in which an angel teaches all those present a rather earthly lesson. Too much learning can be a dangerous thing for a novelist who needs to separate the learned monograph from the illuminating tale. Dull and forced. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Random House UK
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0099591812
• ISBN 13: 9780099591818
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304