"In my mind's eye, Shakespeare is a huge, hot sea-beast, with fire in his veins and ice on his claws and inscrutable eyes, who looks like an inchoate hump under the encrustations of live barnacle-commentaries, limpets and trailing weeds."
English novelist, critic, and scholar whose fiction combined intellectual depth with formal experimentation. She received broad acclaim for works including Possession, which won the Booker Prize. Her career also included influential literary criticism and essays.