The Virgin in the Garden was published by Chatto & Windus in 1978 — the first volume of a quartet that would take nearly twenty-five years to complete. Set in Yorkshire in 1953, the year of Elizabeth II’s coronation, it centers on the Potter family: Bill Potter, a demanding schoolmaster who teaches his children Frederica, Stephanie, and Marcus with fierce intellectual ambition; and the community around a school where a verse drama about Elizabeth I is being performed to celebrate the new Elizabethan age.
Frederica — brilliant, aggressive, sexually curious, intellectually voracious — is the novel’s center of energy. She is cast as the young Elizabeth I in the play (written by a local playwright, Alexander Wedderburn), and the parallel between the first Elizabeth’s navigation of power and desire and Frederica’s own adolescent struggles provides the novel’s thematic architecture. Stephanie, the quieter sister, marries a curate and enters domestic life; Marcus, the youngest, experiences mystical visions that may be religious ecstasy or mental illness.
Byatt’s ambition is to write a novel of ideas in which ideas are not merely discussed but embodied in character and action: the intellectual debates of the 1950s (about science and religion, about women’s education, about the meaning of the new reign) are felt as lived experience rather than abstract argument.
Collecting The Virgin in the Garden
First edition (Chatto & Windus, London, 1978): Cloth with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $75–$200
- Very good: $30–$75