[reflections on reading]

On the relationship between memory and landscape in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park

"And about reflection, I think the other thing that happens in all novels is that because you read a novel by yourself in a room, inner space in your own mind and outer space in novels become somehow equivalent, images of each other . . . There's a way in which the whole landscape is inside in a novel, even if it's said to be outside, which I find peculiarly exciting. I think to myself about the world in the head. And Mansfield at some level that I can't even quite explain is a very powerful image of that experience of having a whole world in your head . . ."

A. S. Byatt and Ignes Sodre, Imagining Characters: Six Conversations about Women Writers, ed. Rebecca Smith ( London, 1995), 37.