The Virgin in the Garden

In The Virgin in the Garden, Byatt begins her series of four novels about the startlingly intellectual Potter family. In this first installment, it is the early ’50s, the war is just over, and Elizabeth II has just been crowned queen of England. The plot revolves around an amateur dramatic production of the life of the earlier Queen Elizabeth, and ends as a kind of coming-of-age novel in which Frederica, the most ambitious of the Potter children, begins to realize the necessity of escaping from her smothering family.