In Passions of the Mind, A S Byatt writes as an artist and scholar taking the reader on a journey of discovery as she explores the ideas, images and attitudes to language underpinning some of her own ficiton, and also the work of Great Victorians and a varied range of twentieth century women writers. Fascinated by the coincidence of the symbolic and real which she finds in her favourite writers - Robert Browning, George Eliot and Wallace Stevens - A S Byatt also celebrates this quality in the sun and shados of Van Gogh's painting.