The Virgin in the Garden
Coronation summer in Yorkshire, and a verse play about the first Elizabeth is got up on the lawns of a great house while a second Elizabeth is crowned in London. Frederica Potter, seventeen and ferociously literary, wins the part of the young queen; her elder sister gives up a teaching career for a curate, and their brother's visions of light and geometry are pulling him apart. The opening panel of a quartet Byatt worked at for a quarter of a century, tracking one schoolmaster's family through post-war England.
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