Possession: A Romance

Product Information

I’ve seen reviews where readers have skipped the poetry which is sad because it’s both an important carrier of the novel’s ideas and themes as well as making interventions in the narrative. and electrical message-network of various desires, ideological beliefs and responses, language-forms and hormones and pheromones.

As the protagonists and villains of modern day literature departments compete for academic renown, as the different schools piece their knowledge separately together, as Michell falls in love with Maud, Byatt unwinds the story of an academia that has lost the big picture: the picture of what matters.I love the details of 19th Century life, the language of that time, poetry, a mystery and human tragedy and struggle.

Winner of England's Booker Prize and a literary sensation, Possession traces the lives of a pair of young academics as they uncover a clandestine relationship between two long-dead Victorian poets.I wasn’t even in it to re-approach situations and characters with a new perspective of age and experience. A petite, pale woman with gleaming eyes, green like emeralds, crystalline like a dragon’s stare, sits in a carriage oblivious of the bearded gentleman sitting opposite her who memorizes the lines of her features with fascinated absorption.

The book sprang apart, like a box, disgorging leaf after leaf of faded paper, blue, cream, grey, covered with rusty writing, the brown scratches of a steel nib. Roland had only recently discovered that the London Library possessed Ash's own copy of Vico's Principj di Scienza Nuova. The novel concerns the relationship between two fictional Victorian poets, Randolph Henry Ash (whose life and work are loosely based on those of the English poet Robert Browning, or Alfred, Lord Tennyson, whose work is more consonant with the themes expressed by Ash, as well as Tennyson's having been poet-laureate to Queen Victoria) and Christabel LaMotte (based on Christina Rossetti), [3] as uncovered by present-day academics Roland Michell and Maud Bailey. This lock of hair is the one buried with Ash which was discovered by the scholars, who believed it to be LaMotte’s.At first Roland worked with the kind of concentrated curiosity with which he read anything at all by Randolph Ash. Leonora, it seems to me, is so much larger than life, and I have to wonder if the character got away from Byatt, if perhaps, she had been intended to be more of "bad" critic than she is. Some of this, sure, is perhaps about developing better taste and letting go of adolescent attachments. When he left, with his green and tomato boxes heaped on his Selected Ash, they nodded affably from behind the issue desk.

It's the warmth and spirit that Byatt has breathed into her characters rather than their cerebral pursuits that makes us care". I mean, just to rattle off a few: feminism, post-modernism, living in a post-modern world, deconstructionism, many many issues of religion and spirituality, cultural relativism and archetypes, living in a globalized world, negotiating the self in relationships, the academic life and petty infighting, etc, etc.A distinguished critic and author, and the recipient of the 2016 Erasmus Prize for her "inspiring contribution to 'life writing, '" she died in 2023. There are two main timelines here: a pair of Victorian poets (Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte, loosely based on Browning/Tennyson and Christina Rossetti, respectively), and various modern academics who specialise in either RHA or LaMotte (principally Roland Michell and Maud Bailey). Byatt is musing on different kinds of ownership, or possession, and how ethical they may or may not be. Ash asks his daughter to pass on a message to LaMotte that he is happy now, but the little girl forgets to do it.