Imagining Characters. Six Conversations About Women Writers.

First edition. 8vo. Pp. xiii, 268. Maroon cloth boards, lettered in gilt to spine; navy-blue endpapers. Source Notes, Index.

In a series of transcribed conversations on the books they love, A.S. Byatt, leading British novelist, and Ignês Sodré, a Brazilian psychoanalyst, bring their different backgrounds and professional experiences of "reading" to bear on six great novels by women authors: Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, Charlotte Brontë's Villette, George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, Willa Cather's The Professor's House, Iris Murdoch's An Unofficial Rose and Toni Morrison's Beloved. Booker Prize-winner A.S. Byatt was named by The Times newspaper in 2008 as one of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.