A.S. Byatt and the Follies of Magical Progressivism

The Booker prize winning author A. S. Byatt died last week, aged 87. In her penultimate work, The Children’s Book, she describes a moment of history in which a new sexual libertinism became particularly oppressive for women, of the dangerous effects of new technologies, how each of these combined with a disruptive political activism, and, importantly, about an interest in magic and the occult amongst the chattering classes of late Victorian and Edwardian England.