At present great importance is attached to the teaching of foreign languages. No doubt, it happens not without purpose

Conclusion

Byatt is a distinguished English critic and novelist best known for her Booker Prize-winning, neo-Victorian novel Possession （1990）. Byatt is known for her faithfulness to Victorian language and mores and her multilayered texts which include novels, poems, letters, and journals within the narrative construct as well as allusions to art, philosophy, religion, and literary theory. Byatt has stated that her works “try to be about the life of the mind as well as of society and the relations between people.”

Much of Byatt's fiction is concerned with the creative process and the imagination. In The Game （1967） Byatt studies the pitfalls of the creative process and the inability of the imagination and fiction to accurately articulate reality. The book also employs one of Byatt's favorite devices, the novel within a novel. Sugar （1987） is a series of short stories exploring loss, including “Precipice Encurled,” a fictionalized account of an event from the life of Robert Browning. Possession tells the story of two academic researchers whose own love story parallels that of the two 19th-century poets who are the subject of their research. Angels and Insects （1992） contains two novellas, “Morpho Eugenia” and “The Conjugial Angel.” Both are written in an imitation of Victorian-style English and deal with the notions of free will and determinism. The tales presented in The Matisse Stories （1993） each link to a different painting by Matisse and reveal Byatt's continuing interest in painting. Babel Tower （1996） is the third in a planned tetralogy featuring Byatt's heroine Frederica Potter. The earlier installments, The Virgin in the Garden （1978） and Still Life (1986） follow Frederica through her years at Cambridge. Babel Tower begins in 1964 and explores Frederica's marriage to Nigel Reiver. The two are soon divorced, and the novel follows Frederica as she struggles with single motherhood in the tumultuous 1960s.