[In the following review, Grumbach argues that “there is very little in [Passions of the Mind] to praise, and much to be warned against.”]

Antonia Susan Byatt, in middle age, has made a remarkable and sudden splash on the international scene. Sister of the novelist Margaret Drabble, she was obscured by Drabble's fame since the '60s when Byatt began to write literary essays and reviews. She burst into international notice two years ago with the publication of Possession, an extraordinarily inventive “Victorian” novel that won Britain's prestigious Booker Prize for the best work of fiction published in 1990. A scholarly mystery story, both a romance and a linguistic masterpiece, Possession became an American best-seller.

In the nature of such things, her publisher would normally have asked her for a collection of short stories. Not being given to that form, Byatt instead has gathered together a number of what are sometimes called “fugitive pieces,” essays, introductions and reviews, to form this new book [Passions of the Mind].

Aficionados of Possession will find some of them hard going, a little tough to chew and not of great interest by virtue of their subject matter, most notably her study of Robert Browning, to her mind “one of the greatest English poets” （the other two being John Donne and Robert Graves）. Browning on his own terms is hardly a lively poet （at least to this reader）; Byatt's exegesis did little to awaken my interest in “The Ring and the Book.” I have always got round this limitation of mine by maintaining an affection for Browning the man and the lover, but Byatt believes otherwise.

“He is a poet who writes men and women, all separately incarnate, all separately aware in their necessarily and splendidly limited ways, of infinite passion and the pain of finite hearts that yearn.” I am not certain exactly what this means but, as Gertrude Stein once remarked, it must mean something.

Another essay “celebrates” （Byatt's word） George Eliot for being “a novelist of ideas,” capable of wildly funny and satiric writing. Her evidence for this somewhat startling judgment is one Eliot essay, “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists,” hardly a strong argument for a writer who, with the exception of Middlemarch, produced a series of often drearily moralistic novels, from Scenes of Clerical Life to Daniel Deronda.

Byatt writes admirably of Ford Madox Ford, the great master of description, she claims, whose The Good Soldier and Parade's End she sees as great fictional achievements. And she stretches the modernist, comic characteristics of Iris Murdoch's A Severed Head, Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time, Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King, Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night, and Muriel Spark's The Turnover, to show the profound influence of The Golden Bough and Sigmund Freud on them. There are interesting, if debatable insights here, but of course the reader who is not thoroughly familiar with these works, as well as the catafalque on which they are spread, will find the interpretations heavily academic.

My own interest lay primarily in the section of the collection called “The Female Voice?”—an umbrella under which Byatt reviews books by Sylvia Plath, Toni Morrison, Georgette Heyer （“a superlatively good writer of honorable escape”）, Barbara Pym and Monique Wittig, and then reprints her Virago introductions to three Willa Cather novels. The odd thing about these pieces is that the question of voice in female writers is not mentioned in any of them. Now that I think of it, this might account for the curious punctuation mark in the section's title.

Concerning Willa Cather: Some very good critical work has been done on Cather since Byatt's introductions were published in 1980, by Sharon O'Brien and Hermione Lee and others. So it is inevitable that her observations will seem dated. For The Professor's House she creates elaborate parallels between characters' names and history （she believes without much credible evidence that Cather had “formidable learning in European art and literature”） to show the patterns Cather made in the novel. But she denies Lionel Trilling's reading of the novel as exemplifying a mood of disillusion, disgust and corrupted idealism after World War I, substituting for this defensible thesis a flabby summary that “the novel embodies complex—and unresolved—feelings about families, solitude, generosity, and possessions.”

Byatt disagrees with David Daiches and most other critics about the mythic, symbolic nature of Alexandra in O Pioneers!, ignoring the very cosmic language in which Cather's creation is couched. But she fails to build a case for her contention that Alexandra is full of “genuine human virtue” beyond her decision to try to save Frank Shabata, who murdered her beloved brother.

Enough. There is very little in this collection to praise, and much to be warned against. Fugitive pieces they are indeed, “unresolved” judgments （in Byatt's term）. To use another of her formulations, one can ask only for an “honorable escape.” Whatever that means.