I first encountered the novels of A.S. Byatt in a British Literature survey I took to fulfill a degree requirement in college. When the professor assigned Possession, Byatt's 1990 Booker Prize winner, she did so with an apologia to the class for its bulk, but beseeched us to "read it anyway" as she hoped we would enjoy how it managed to allude to everything we'd ever read before, all while narrating a new romance that, my excited professor insisted, we "would not be able to put down 'til the end."

As we all know, reader-to-reader-, that's the most enticing endorsement one can make for a novel, and in the case of Possession, it proved more than true. Since that time, I've enjoyed an intellectual love affair with Byatt through one dense novel after the next, and as any other lover of her thoroughly literary and constitutionally European stories and novels would agree, it is a pleasure to complicate my liaisons with her books by reading her own critical thoughts about the writing and traditions of writing histories and stories.

A.S. Byatt's On Histories and Stories: Selected Essays (Harvard University Press 2001) is a collection of seven essays (most of which were published or delivered as lectures prior to appearing here) and an introduction by Byatt herself. Each essay exhaustively examines either the process of storytelling, or the thematic relationships between texts Byatt favors or considers a part of the canon. And what composes the canon, Byatt argues in her introduction, should in fact be less politicized than it has become. Byatt writes, "As George Steiner wisely pointed out, making syllabuses, which is a political activity, is different from making a canon." She adds, to explain herself, "A canon (which is not immutable) is (I think) what other writers have wanted to keep alive, to go on reading, over time. There is always a fear that good books may slip through the net of syllabuses, or disappear when political priorities change" (2). This is a connotation of that canon and a concern about literary politics I can endorse as a syllabus maker myself — Byatt does not deny how deeply politics are embedded in literary production but regrets the subsumation of a writer's art into its social politics.

This position, of course, springs from Byatt's identity as a writer, and as someone who reads as a writer does. As she further explains this position, "I think those of us who write about modern writing have a duty to keep the discussion open and fluent and very broad based. We need to create new paradigms, which will bring new books, new styles, new preoccupations to the attention of readers." It is certain that the essays in this collection, broad ranging and appreciative as they are of a variety of writings and writers, fulfill her description for what criticism should be.