[It] is clear why Byatt is unknown on these shores: She is very English—insularly so…. She writes out of an imperturbable tradition of English literature, a tradition that takes note of contemporary currents without drifting away on them. The men and women in [The Virgin in the Garden] bear some resemblance to present-day men and women; they also resemble the men and women of Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy—they even, most unfashionably, resemble each other in a way that the sexes are no longer presumed to….

The Virgin in the Garden is a lushly-woven novel, a tapestry of conflicting sensibilities. Byatt writes with a somewhat remote but unerring skill; she is always intelligent, often witty, and frequently slips in the kind of humanly wise observation for which one reads such novels in the first place: "Pain hardens, and great pain hardens greatly, whatever the...