English novelist A.S. Byatt has been described as a "postmodern Victorian." Her novels include the bestseller "Possession" and "Angels and Insects," which was recently made into a movie by director Phillip Haas. In an interview sponsored by San Francisco's City Arts and Lecture Series, Byatt discussed "Angels and Insects," D.H. Lawrence, and the challenges of literary feminism.

Tell us about writing "Angels and Insects."

I began with a visual image. I wanted to write a story which combined my obsession with television naturalism with my obsession with Victorian gothic. I thought you could make a really beautiful film which compared an ant heap to a Victorian mansion. And in the middle of the ant heap there's this large fat white queen simply producing children. The question is: is she the power center, or is she the slave?

It didn't have a plot for a long time -- it was just this metaphor, which is a very simple one but works. And it got bigger and bigger. I had this vision of all these slightly sexless female servants, scurrying along the corridors of the gothic mansion like the worker ants. I read a lot of books about ant heaps, and a lot of books about Victorian servant life.

The pun on "insect" and "incest" only occurred to me very, very late on, as a way of dealing with the plot, though it is, of course, also the case with insects in an ant heap. But then I had this further metaphorical idea that there should be a man who wanted to marry a butterfly and found he'd married the queen of the ants by mistake. He was a Darwinian and a determinist, while her father was desperately clinging to Christianity, and a religious lord of the manor.

Darwin had said there is a kind of autonomism in our choice of mates, a kind of determinism, driving people to choose a mate for beauty rather than for moral reasons. So I wanted to put that in too, and once you got all that in place, the characters didn't have to have an awful lot of character. It's driven by the story and the metaphor.

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Next page: Talking back to D.H. Lawrence