BOOK REVIEW : A Critical Byatt Examines the ‘Habits of the Mind’ : PASSIONS OF THE MIND: Selected Essays <i> by A. S. Byatt</i> ; Turtle Bay Books $25; 312 pages

Until the publication last year of her Booker Prize-winning novel, “Possession,” A(ntonia) S(usan) Byatt was less well known in America than her younger sister, Margaret Drabble.

Where she was known, largely in the academy, it was for her critical studies, “Degrees of Freedom: The Novels of Iris Murdoch” and “Wordsworth and Coleridge in Their Time.”

Readers of her criticism will not be surprised by the range of her interests and her incisive judgments in this selection from her more occasional pieces, “Passions of the Mind,” just as readers of her earlier novels, particularly “Shadow of a Sun” and “The Game,” were prepared for the intricate complexity of “Possession.”

What she has said of her own fiction is also pertinent to her critical studies:

“My fiction is concerned with habits of mind--the nature of the imagination, the ways in which different people take in the world, the uses of what they think or see.”

After two introductory pieces on her own experience as a student and writer, Byatt turns to her favorite Victorians: Browning and George Eliot.

Like many of us, Byatt had George Eliot (who translated Strauss’ “Leben Jesu”) inflicted upon her at too early an age, and it was not until she began teaching a course in the modern English novel that she began to appreciate “Middlemarch” and “Daniel Deronda.”

Byatt mounts a persuasive defense of George Eliot’s authorial interventions in her fiction, “which were then very unfashionable.”

And what Byatt has to say of George Eliot’s essays, which she has edited, describes some of Byatt’s own qualities:

“George Eliot read Latin, Greek, French, Spanish, Italian and German: she was au fait with current philosophy, physiology, psychology and sociology: She wrote with ferocious authority. I liked that--I admire the deployment of a clear mind and a lot of information. . . . But what is also marvelous about the essays is that they are sharp, trenchant, satirical, in places wildly funny.”

Byatt is somewhat mellower and more tolerant than that. She is at her witty best when she discusses the work of contemporary writers of free verse.

She respects the earliest experimenters in this mode; they were struggling against conventional forms that they knew well and could use, yet forms that they frequently found inadequate to their personal needs.

But as Byatt wryly observes, many of the current crop of free versifiers, hortatory and lyric, show in their work that they are quite unaware of what they are “free” of, often with unconsciously humorous, if not disastrous, results.

Byatt spent the academic year 1957-58 at Bryn Mawr, and she has subsequently taught American as well as English literature. Her comments on American writers, particularly women, are of particular interest.

After she began writing introductions for reprints of Willa Cather’s novels, she found her original interest in Cather’s work growing into something larger.

Impressed by the standard comment that American literature “which seemed, unlike English literature, to have few indisputably major women writers,” she found her respect deepening.

Eventually she could write that Cather “seems to me to be a major writer, who created her own form to suit her own subject matter. She also came to matter to me personally, as a writer from whom I could learn.”

This statement of indebtedness is characteristic of Byatt’s generous acknowledgment throughout of what she has learned from others. Of Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” she says:

“This is a huge, generous, humane and gripping novel. In the foreground is the life of the black people whose courage and dignity and affection are felt to be almost indomitable.”

These are only samplings from this provocative gathering of Byatt’s work, which, read as a whole, reflects the reactions of a lively, inquiring mind into the issues that confront a writer today.

Next: Chris Goodrich reviews “A Closed Eye” by Anita Brookner (Poseidon).