Fairy tales and the Fiction of Iris Murdoch, Margaret Drabble, and A.S. Byatt

The Grimm brothers' fairy tales have long fascinated readers with their violence and frank sexuality. Three of Britain's most important novelists, Iris Murdoch, Margaret Drabble, and A. S. Byatt, have shared this fascination. Their fiction explores the darker themes of fairy tales - bestiality, cannibalism, and incest - and finds within them reasons to be optimistic about our fractured modern world.

The Children's Book

Gorgeously stuffed? Or overstuffed? Critics were clearly split on Byatt's latest offering. Several enthusiastically praised The Children's Book as a stunning literary achievement, a thinking person's novel, and the most noteworthy of Byatt's books since Possession was published almost 20 years ago. Others argued that, while Byatt is adept at richly evoking the Edwardian era, the book stumbles under the weight of its own excess.