Besides the intellectual artifice, at the heart of the boxes within boxes, puns, parodies, donnish and in-groupy references, which I imagine an American reader will feel impatient with, there is something important and accessible, relevant and potentially gripping in The Virgin in the Garden. Consider the virgin, consider the garden. The virgin is Frederica and Queen Elizabeth I and, beyond that, the idea of female intactness, Virgo-Astraea, the Greek sense of belonging to oneself (the original meaning of "virginity").

Alexander's play and especially Frederica's part in it focus on Elizabeth's (actual) declaration that she would not bleed, her choice of lifelong virginity, and the perhaps concomitant "masculine" strength of her character and her reign…. Hovering over the play and Byatt's novel are questions: what is female strength? how is it possible? Frederica is surrounded by women whose "submission" to sexual life has left them less than they were: her mother hides her own education in the face of a blistering, overbearing husband; her sister seems to die as her pregnancy advances. (p. 36)

The garden's symbolism draws on Renaissance literary convention: Paradise, Eden, place and time when everything seemed closed and perfect. The play itself is performed in the garden of a great house. The time of the novel, the fifties, is seen as a period of blissful ignorance, especially about matters of consciousness and sexuality: Frederica had wanted traditional things of Alexander—that he save her, teach her, make love to her. (p. 38)

By the end of the novel, serenity and enclosure have fallen away. A Prologue that puts what comes afterward in a peculiarly ironic light shows Alexander, Frederica, and Daniel in London, in 1968, attending a program about Elizabeth I. It is a scene full of empty dissatisfaction—among the characters and in their relation to the world. In this context the fifties, the garden, the virginity, are seen with rueful nostalgia. The present seems a time when things have fallen apart, to Byatt's eye, quite lost, bereft of the energy that came with misguided certainty. (pp. 38-9)