A.S. Byatt

Huh. I've been rereading A Whistling Woman, the final book in A.S. Byatt's Frederica Potter quartet, and was inspired to go back and reread The Virgin in the Garden, the first book in the series. It starts off with a prologue that takes place around the time of second half of Whistling Woman and feels somewhat unrelated to the rest of Vigin thematically. But rereading it after reading the whole quartet, I can see that it predicts where the quartet will go with Babel Tower and Whistling Woman, the third and fourth books, with reference to the image of Elizabeth I, who as the Virgin Queen who occupies a central place in Vigin and to a lesser extent Still Life, the second book in the quartet. Daniel Ottakar, a character who doesn't appear until the third book, also makes a cameo appearance. The thing that makes this quite amazing is that Virgin was published in 1979 and Whistling Woman was published in 2002, and over the course of writing the quartet, Byatt's style and approach changed substantially. Amazing that she knew in the late 70s where she would be going in the early 2000s.

As I sit around searching for jobs, I don't have anyone around to share these reflections with, so y'all are getting them.