Angels and Insects
Read Angels and Insects Online
Authors: A. S. Byatt
A. S. BYATT’S
Angels & Insect
“A pleasure to read … both stories are essentially romantic fantasies, written with grace and an expert use of literary reference.”
—
The Atlantic
“[Offers] that greatest pleasure of a historical novel: flawless research mobilized to support an entrancing story.… Byatt writes with meticulous realism about a world no one alive has ever set foot in.”
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Village Voice Literary Supplement
“Neatly contrasting and vividly effective stories of people grappling with the ineradicable loss of love—both divine and human—in ways very much relevant today; and sometimes, with luck and good faith, rediscovering it in unexpected places. [Byatt is] a formidable novelist indeed.”
—
Chicago Tribune
“These canny tales [full of] subtlety and shrewdness … evoke [a] concentrated and fine-grained intensity. Nabokov surely would have appreciated Byatt’s exacting attention. [She] puts tingling flesh on the bones of the old Victorian debate over biological determinism and the descent of man [and] showcases her flair for exposing the mannerly subterfuges and erotic undercurrents of the Victorian sitting room.”
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Boston Globe
“Charm and narrative drive [are] found in abundance.… Where Byatt is erudite she is also playful; where she is ironic she is also respectful; where she is robust and sensuous she is also delicate and careful. Byatt’s profound feeling for human sorrow animates
Angels & Insects
, creating vitality and energy out of the ashes of suffering and loss.”
—
USA Today
“Two delicious tales of the marvelous, evoked through precise, striking descriptions. The almost lurid Victorian devotion to the dead, the sanctification of ‘undying’ love and, finally, the supremacy of the physical world are touched on lightly yet poignantly. The comic undertone only emphasizes Byatt’s generosity of spirit.”
—
San Francisco Examiner
“As in her Booker Prize-winning novel
Possession
, Byatt immerses us in the Victorian world. You can see the influence of George Eliot and Iris Murdoch in her prose’s mix of philosophical seriousness, modernist irony, and old-fashioned realism.… Henry James also comes to mind.”
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Boston Phoenix Literary Section
“
Angels & Insects
offers two brief visions of a world which Byatt understands uniquely well: 19th-century England and the men and women who shaped it. Taken separately, either tale could stand as a perfectly formed … work. Together they form something rather more complex and substantial.”
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Washington Post Book World
“An exquisitely executed, intelligent, and diverting diptych.… Byatt’s lushly descriptive prose has a Pre-Raphaelite vividness of color and detail.”
—
Christian Science Monitor
Angels & Insect
A. S. Byatt is the author of the Booker Prize–winning
Possession: A Romance
. She has taught English and American literature at University College, London, and is a distinguished critic and reviewer. Her critical work includes
Degrees of Freedom
(a study of Iris Murdoch),
Unruly Times: Wordsworth and Coleridge in Their Time
, and
Passions of the Mind: Selected Essays
. She is also the author of five previously published works of fiction,
Shadow of a Sun, The Game, The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life
, and
Sugar and Other Stories. The Matisse Stories
, a collection of short fiction, is her most recent work.
A. S. BYATT
FICTION
Shadow of a Sun
The Game
The Virgin in the Garden
Still Life
Sugar and Other Stories
Possession
Angels & Insects
The Matisse Stories
CRITICISM
Degrees of Freedom:
The Novels of Iris Murdoch
Unruly Times:
Wordsworth and Coleridge in Their Times
Passions of the Mind
First Vintage International Edition, April 1994
Copyright © 1992 by A. S. Byatt
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American
Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in
Great Britain by Chatto & Windus Ltd., London, in 1992.
First published in the United States by Random House, Inc.,
New York, in 1993.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Byatt, A. S. (Antonia Susan), 1936–
Angels & insects: two novellas / A. S. Byatt —
1st Vintage International ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-81959-8
I. Title. II. Title: Angels and insects.
PR6052.Y52A83 1994
823′.914—dc20 93-43495
v3.1
For Jean-Louis Chevalier
Morpho Eugenia
‘You must dance, Mr Adamson,’ said Lady Alabaster from her sofa. ‘It is very kind of you to sit by me, and fetch glasses of lemonade, but I really do think you must dance. Our young ladies have made themselves beautiful in your honour, and I hope their efforts will not have been in vain.’
‘I think they are all delightful,’ said William Adamson, ‘but I am out of practice at ballroom dancing.’
‘Not much dancing in the jungle,’ stated Mr Edgar Alabaster.
‘On the contrary. There is a great deal of dancing. There are religious festivals—Christian festivals—which occupy weeks together with communal dancing. And in the interior there are Indian dances where you must imitate the hops of woodpeckers, or the wriggle of armadillos, for hour after hour.’ William opened his mouth to say more, and closed it again. Didactic rushes of information were a great shortcoming in returning travellers.
Lady Alabaster moved some of her black silk rolls of flesh on the rosy satin of her sofa. She persisted. ‘I shall ask Matty to find you a pretty partner, unless you can pick one out for yourself.’
The shimmering girls whirled past in the candlelight, shell-pink and sky-blue, silver and citron, gauze and tulle. A small orchestra, two fiddles, a flute, a bassoon and a cello scraped and shrilled and boomed in the minstrels’ gallery. William Adamson felt constricted, but composed, inside a dress suit borrowed from Lionel Alabaster. He remembered a
festa
on the Rio Manaquiry, lit by lamps made of half an orange-skin filled with turtle oil. He had danced with the
Juiza
, the lady of the revels, barefoot and in his
shirtsleeves. There, his whiteness itself had given him automatic precedence at table. Here he seemed sultry-skinned, with jaundice-gold mixed into sun-toasting. He was tall and naturally bony, almost cadaverous after his terrible experiences at sea. The pale people in the soft light polka’d past, murmuring to each other. The music stopped, the partners walked away from the floor, clapping and laughing. All three Alabaster daughters were being conducted back to the group round their mother. Eugenia, Rowena, and Enid.
