In this innovative and wide-ranging book, Byatt and the psychoanalyst Ignes Sodre bring their different sensibilities to bear on six novels they have read and loved: Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, Charlotte Bronte's Villette, George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, Willa Cather's The Professor's House, Iris Murdoch's An Unofficial Rose, and Toni Morrison's Beloved. The results are nothing less than an education in the ways literature grips its readers and at times, transforms their very lives.

Whether they are examining the bewildering passivity of Jane Austen's heroines, exploring Willa Cather's code of solitude, or reading Toni Morrison's Beloved as a novel about spite, Byatt and Sodre are witty, humane, funny, and profound. For anyone who loves Byatt's novels, for anyone who loves literature, Imagining Characters is indispensable, a work of criticism that returns us to the books it discusses with renewed respect and wonder.