Think of this – that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other. True, the writer may have been alone also with Spenser's golden apples in the Faerie Queene, Proserpina's garden, glistening bright among the place's ashes and cinders, may have seen in his mind's eye, apple of his eye, the golden fruit of the Primavera, may have seen Paradise Lost, in the garden where Eve recalled Pomona and Proserpina. He was alone when he wrote and he was not alone then, all these voices sang, the same words, golden apples, different words in different places, an Irish castle, un unseen cottage, elastic-walled and grey round blind eyes.
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About A.S. Byatt
A.S. Byatt was a 20th-century British writer. Dame Antonia Susan Duffy, known professionally by her former married name, A. S. Byatt, was an English critic, novelist, poet and short-story writer. Read more on Wikipedia →