The Wild Garden is both an autobiographical essay on the creative process and a remarkable personal account of the circumstances surrounding the nervous crisis that impelled Angus Wilson to become a writer at the age of thirty-six. Examining specific incidents, characters, places and recurring symbols in his life and work, notably the wild garden itself, Wilson analyses the links between his own life crisis and the theme of liberation by self-realization that was to be central to all his novels. 'The Wild Garden is, quite simply, one of the finest accounts of the creative process by a recent writer that I know. Here Angus Wilson looks at the springs of writing in a way that all writers can recognize, and all readers appreciate as a way into the brilliant, discovering imagination that lay behind his major novels.' Malcolm Bradbury