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Imagining Characters: Six Conversations About Women Writers: Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Willa Cather, Iris Murdoch, and Toni Morrison.

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From: The Women's Review of Books
Date: 19971201
Author:Hite, Molly

During the last of the "conversations" that make up this book, the British novelist A.S. Byatt remarks, "I feel we've discovered or reintroduced conversation as a form of shared reading - a pleasure and a way of learning which has almost vanished." The idea of conversation as shared reading evokes a powerful intimacy, recalling dorm-rooms rather than classrooms and suggesting immersion in rather than analysis of a fictional universe and its characters. Yet in this age of bookstore assignations and passionate author discussion groups online, can anyone say this pleasure and way of ...

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