The two scholars find more letters and evidence of a love affair between the poets (with evidence of a holiday together during which – they suspect – the relationship may have been consummated); they become obsessed with discovering the truth. Something here might be made of your Fairy's legendary rootedness in veritable castles and genuine agricultural reform--one of the queerest aspects of her story, to a modern mind.

The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. A remarkable feat of storytelling through prose and poetry that compares with nothing I have ever read before.It sends up academics of all stamps (dusty, thrusting, shy, ambitious, greedy, gender-obsessed, sex-obsessed, celibate). Byatt was the author of numerous novels, including The Children's Book, The Biographer's Tale, and Possession, which was awarded the Booker Prize.

It’s just something where the vast majority of the time I spend during the day is spent in tasks that are for the most part not suited to my personality or many of my strengths. Possession is an exhilarating novel of wit and romance, at once a literary detective novel and a triumphant love story. Byatt really has done a succesful tour de force in recreating the Victorian time period: the book contains lots of long poems and stories in this Victorian style, very concise, meticulously detailed, full of mythological references and floral and animal descriptions. For the next half hour Roland worked haphazardly, moving backwards and forwards in the Vico, half-looking for Proserpina, half-reading Ash's notes, which was not easy, since they were written in various languages, in Ash's annotating hand, which was reduced to a minute near-printing, not immediately identifiable as the same as his more generous poetic or letter-writing hand. That after passion is spent, heartache subdued and disappointments diluted in the sea of memories, that long after the stillborn happiness has burnt out in the arson of irreconcilable pasts, dead words will be rekindled from the ashes with every new reading, Phoenix-like.If the world refuses to listen, she'll wedge the truth into our ears with a handful of steel-plated swabs. They uncover a large amount of information that will permanently change scholarship on LaMotte and Ash.

She gradually becomes more open as she grows closer to Roland, who she eventually falls in love with. In 'Possession' I used this kind of narrator deliberately three times in the historical narrative—always to tell what the historians and biographers of my fiction never discovered, always to heighten the reader's imaginative entry into the world of the text. There are things that happen and leave no discernible trace, are not spoken of or written of, though it would be wrong to say that subsequent events go on indifferently, all the same, as though such things had never been. The librarian fetched a checked duster, and wiped away the dust, a black, thick, tenacious Victorian dust, a dust composed of smoke and fog particles accumulated before the Clean Air Acts. For my true thoughts have spent more time in your company than in anyone else’s, these last two or three months, and where my thoughts are, there am I, in truth, even if- like the May, only a threshold-presence, by decree.He was not sure that Miss Rossetti would have approved of Ash's theology, or of his sexual psychology. 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. But it alternates between being too self-consciously clever (all those unique writing styles, with the historical poems hiding clues to secrets of the past as well as triggering ripples in the modern story) and too predictable plotwise, propped up by stereotyped characters and clichéd situations. I am at the point with this book where I am not only remembering the scenes and words, I am doubling that over with my memories of myself reading them and feeding off of them, trying to make them a part of my immediate self again. Does that mean we can't understand the twentieth century fully, in a world where there was never a Randolph Henry Ash?

It was immediately clear that the book had been undisturbed for a very long time, perhaps even since it had been laid to rest. Not one I'd probably ever read again, but who knows—I can see it being more rewarding on a re-read now having the knowledge of what is to come. Maud Bailey, the leading LaMotte scholar, lives ''on the outskirts of Lincoln'' and spends her time writing articles about ''liminality'' in the poems of LaMotte, who (it so happens) is her distant ancestor.

He thought he knew Ash fairly well, as well as anyone might know a man whose life seemed to be all in his mind, who lived a quiet and exemplary married life for forty years, whose correspondence was voluminous indeed, but guarded, courteous and not of the most lively. Do people really hate poetry so much that they're skipping a few pages of it in the middle of a story? and Miscellaneous--Dancing, Deaf and Dumb, Death, Dentistry, Devil and Demonology, Distribution, Dogs, Domestic Servants, Dreams.