title: Angels & Insects: Two Novellas
author:  A.S. Byatt 
description: Revisiting the Victorian ambience of Possession , Byatt treats her large audience to more extraordinary literary gamesmanship with two intricate novellas. In "Morpho Eugenia" penniless young entomologist William Adamson has just returned from a 10-year expedition in the Amazon. William is taken in by a titled clergyman with scientific pretensions, and soon marries his benefactor's beautiful daughter. Unable to undertake another Amazon adventure, he studies domestic ant colonies and discovers indecent parallels between the insects and his new family. "The Conjugial Angel" involves a circle of spiritualists, chief among them Alfred Tennyson's sister Emily, in her youth engaged to Arthur Hallam, the man immortalized in Tennyson's In Memorium . Emily has been branded faithless for having married years after Hallam's death (Elizabeth Barrett called her a "disgrace to womanhood"), but she is uncompromising in her pursuit of Hallam's ghost. As fans will anticipate, Byatt effortlessly exploits the opportunities for pastiche, belletristic flourish and critical commentary. If her symbolism is as excessively upholstered and overdetermined as the narratives of her Victorian models, beneath the padding she sets out a delicate chain of thematic concerns--19th-century tensions between science and faith, erotic currents within families, the nature of marital happiness--and heightens them by juxtaposing the two novellas here. Her easy ventriloquism mocks Victorian excesses even as she uses these same elements to inveigle her readers. Complex and captivating, this fluid volume recasts itself on every page. <br />Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
zlib_text: A COMPUTE SCIEtttf-FICTION NOVEL 
  by FRANCIS RUFUS BELLAMY
  TWO COMPLETE NOVELS 35C
  [ “One of the most 
  [fascinating fantasies 
  ^ ever published." |
  —Boston Traveler
  ACE
  OOUBLf NOVEL 
  BOOKS
  FRANCIS RUFUS BELLAMY
  
  “ CARRIES THE READER QUITE IRRE­
  SISTIBLY ALOm . .
  —Joseph Wood Krutch
  This astonishing novel of a man who found himself 
  thrust into a nightmarish world of giant insects and 
  incredible adventures won the enthusiastic applause 
  of reviewers throughout the country. For example, 
  Margaret Parton in the New York Herald-Tribune 
  wrote:
  “Of the ninety-some books which this reviewer 
  has read for these columns since last January, ATTA 
  is the only one which we are quite certain is des­
  tined to become an authentic classic . . . one of 
  permanent excitement, permanent value.
  “It is, first of all, a spine-chilling narrative, filled 
  with battle and suspense. It is a w’ork of extraor­
  dinary imaginative power, extending our own 
  awareness of human and of insect life . . . Every 
  page s