[In the following review, Lewis lauds Byatt's Angels and Insects as a spiritual heir to the Victorian era.]

Two years after Possession, a magnum opus of intellectual passion, A. S. Byatt offers us two enchanting novellas set in the mid-19th-century and enlivened by the uneasy dance of extremes. The dominant quarrel in Angels & Insects—the stark division of Victorian society between Darwinists and creationists—is familiar ground for her readers. Of course, the argument itself is not as important in Byatt's fiction as the effects of this spiritual struggle between “angels and insects” on the men and women of the time.

In the first novella, “Morpho Eugenia,” named after a rare tropical butterfly, explorer and entomologist William Adamson barely survives his shipwrecked journey back to England after 10 years in the Amazon. Reverend Harald Alabaster, a wealthy baronet and amateur entomologist, offers William refuge in his estate, Bredely Hall. William earns his keep by cataloguing Lord Alabaster's huge collection of specimens and oddities of the natural world and by acting as a sounding board for a book in which Lord Alabaster is trying to reconcile natural selection and divine providence.

William soon falls madly in love with Alabaster's mysterious, tragically unhappy daughter Eugenia. Despite their vast social differences—William is the son of a Methodist butcher—Eugenia agrees to marry him. William's naive faith in his wife's purity blinds him to facts that are widely acknowledged by the rest of the household. He reads his own fear of “smutching” Eugenia's virtue into her passivity and indifference during the wedding. He ascribes to the tyranny of nurture over nature the utter lack of his features in the many children Eugenia bears, “as though environment were everything and inheritance nothing.” Feeling trapped by the driving spirit of Bredely Hall, he can not help but draw parallels to the ants he is studying for his own book, A Natural History of a Woodland Society. Just as the drones work tirelessly and altruistically to perpetuate their colony, so William seems to serve as little more than an engenderer of little Alabasters.

Byatt's trademark happy ending is not particularly surprising, but is nonetheless welcome. A drastic twist in the plot sets William free to sail off to the Amazon on the Calypso, accompanied by Matty Crompton, one of the Alabasters' dependent relatives and the only one who truly appreciates him.

A delicate narrative thread links the two novellas, though the thematic ties are many and intricate. “The Conjugial Angel” opens with Lilias Papagay, the Calypso captain's wife, on her way to conduct a seance. The captain disappeared at sea 10 years earlier, and Lilias works as a medium as much to support herself and ease the pain of her loss as to contact her missing husband. The seance is held at the home of Emily Jesse, sister of poet laureate, Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Emily was once engaged to the young poet Arthur Henry Hallam, the subject of Tennyson's most famous poem, “In Memoriam.” Four decades after Hallam's death and despite 33 years of marriage, Emily still mourns her lover, though privately—her grief having been eclipsed by her brother's encomium.

The novella's title refers to the 18th-century mystic and spiritual guide of Victorian mediums: Emanuel Swedenborg's belief that “true conjugial love comes to us all but once, that our souls have one mate, one perfect other half, whom we should seek ceaselessly,” and that two human souls joined in “conjugial love” form one angel. Both Lilias and Emily are reunited with their soulmates—one living, one dead—yet both turn resolutely away from the realm of the spirits to the world of living.

The Victorians' loss of certainty in an active, determining God colored every aspect of their society. In Angels & Insects, Byatt brings vividly to life the divided Victorian soul—split between faith in the intellect and instinct, free will and determinism, and rationalism and spiritualism. By intersecting the natural and the supernatural worlds in her novellas, Byatt effectively resolves the two antitheses into a tense, imaginative synthesis.

The sheer beauty of many scenes as well as Byatt's luxurious, evocative language remain with the reader long after the clever plots and intriguing, but occasionally too lengthy, intellectual constructs have faded. Byatt's writing is masterful, whether describing a simple English hedgerow “with roses and hawthorn, honeysuckle and bryony” newly in bloom or a cloud of butterflies in a hothouse as they came “out of the foliage, down from the glassy dome, darting, floating, fluttering, tawny orange, dark and pale blue, brimstone yellow and clouded white, damask dark and peacock-eyed, and danced round [Emily's] head and settled on her shoulders, and brushed her outstretched hand.”

Angels & Insects is a charming, lavishly sensuous recreation of an era whose spiritual legacy we still bear.