A Whistling Woman is a book written by British author A. S. Byatt. It was published in the United Kingdom by Chatto & Windus in 2002 and in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, which is a part of Penguin.

Tetralogy naming

The novel is the last book in a series of four, which comes after The Virgin in the Garden (1978), Still Life (1985), and Babel Tower (1996). Jonathan Walker, in an article published in Contemporary Literature, called the series of books the "Frederica quartet." The author, A.S. Byatt, said she preferred to refer to the series as The Virgin in the Garden quartet when talking about it. She also mentioned that her publisher planned to release a boxed set of the four books, which would be called The Quartet.

Themes

Byatt has stated that the novel explores themes such as ideas about perfect societies and a harmful type of romantic imagination that is not based on reality. The book A Whistling Woman is partially dedicated to Frances Ashcroft.