Everything you need to understand or teach The Virgin in the Garden by A. S. Byatt.
Some of the important themes of the novel are suggested in its title, The Virgin in the Garden. A number of possibilities for the identity of the virgin and of the garden are offered in the novel; secular, mythological, and historical readings of the phrase are all possible. In Elizabeth I's day, Byatt's playwright character says, there was a richness of symbolic meaning, and people thought in symbolic terms. His play about the...