Possession: A Romance

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Years later, while teaching the work of Robert Browning at University College, London (she had inherited a passion for Browning from her mother), Ms. What you said of Alexander Selkirk's monologue, the good sense you made of the ramblings of my John Bunyan, your understanding of the passion of I? It sends up academics of all stamps (dusty, thrusting, shy, ambitious, greedy, gender-obsessed, sex-obsessed, celibate). The quote at the top of this review is true of this novel, as well as the fictional biography it is describing (Cropper’s one of RHA). I can see that putting people off to begin with, but if you picked up the book already knowing it was about Victorian poets and squabbling Victorian scholars then I would think you'd be prepared for that kind of thing and be able to wade through it.

Byatt's novel follows two academics as they investigate a couple that existed approximately a hundred years previous. I usually think agree to disagree is bullshit, but when you get into literary experimentation, I think that's the only way to come out alive. Roland and Maud receive some information from Leonora Stern, Maud's colleague, that there may be further details on what exactly happened to Ash and LaMotte to be found in France. By far the largest single gathering was of course in the Stant Collection at Robert Dale Owen University in New Mexico, where Mortimer Cropper worked on his monumental edition of the Complete Correspondence of Randolph Henry Ash. Plus, we hear so much about the poems and other peoples' interpretations of them its great to actually see the real things and judge for ourselves, and fits really well into the theme about people creating their own narratives out of the past according to their present needs, and I think reflects cleverly back on the reader.

Did you not find it as strange as I did, that we should so immediately understand each other so well? I have to admit, I did not approach this book this time around with what I would consider pure motives. Over the years I have read this book, my favorite character has gone from Maud to Leonora then to both.

But I run on again; assuredly you have determined on your own best ways of presenting the topic, you who are so wise and learned in your retirement. Possession is set both in the present day and the Victorian era, contrasting the two time periods, as well as echoing similarities and satirising modern academia and mating rituals. These detail that LaMotte fell pregnant due to her relationship with Ash but did not want to tell him. Sorry but this did not interest me a bit, halfway I was about to give up but I managed to quickly read some of the second half. That was when I started to figure out what I was doing because then I tried reading my favorite novel of Arturo Perez-Reverte’s, and similarly, rather than being swept away, all I could see was the melodramatic dialogue and some fucked up coded gender politics that I considered writing an enraged essay about.

The story constantly jumps from between the modern setting to a Victorian love story and is told in the various forms of letters, poems, essays, and straightforward narrative. I chose this job because I had become so disillusioned with the ivory tower academic path I was on that I chose the most opposite thing that I could think of to do that still fell within the realm of my skills and education. I know you go out in company very little, and was the more fortunate that dear Crabb managed to entice you to his breakfast table.

I can find no flaw in Byatt's telling and I think it is kind of laziness not to want to put in any hard work yourself for the pleasure of such a tale. 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. Roland had the small single table he liked best, behind a square pillar, with the clock over the fireplace nevertheless in full view. And as well as the layers of fictional biography, and wondering who is speaking on whose behalf, literal ventriloquism is a recurring theme, there is a seance, and there is even po-mo musing in this po-mo book, when Roland considers “partly with precise postmodernist pleasure, and partly with a real element of superstitious dread, that he and Maud were being driven by a plot or fate that seemed, at least possibly, to be not their plot or fate but that of those others. If it had, where was it, what jewels of information about Ash's "ignored, arcane, deviously perspicuous meanings" might not be revealed by it?I know there are plenty of arguments against it, but to me, it summed up my life in the grey zone between reality lived and consumed in fiction. Between Piccadilly and Putney, where he lived in the basement of a decaying Victorian house, he progressed through his usual states of somnolence, sick juddering wakefulness, and increasing worry about Val.

Can you identify any other instances of characters trying to claim ownership over something in Possession?

A successful scholar specialized in the underrated poetess Christabel LeMotte flushes with emotion as she anxiously leafs through yellowish pages, wrapped by the familiar odor of mildew, wax and ash. This particular read I really attached onto the characters struggling to find out what to do with themselves, what they were worth, after the life prescribed by their parents and other authority figures ends, those characters trying to deal with what other people expect them to be as opposed to how they see themselves, creating the narrative of your own life, being your own person in a relationship, and the connections I keep making between this book and the ideas in Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own. Even her myth-based Ragnarok, 4*, is related, as it's interwoven with the life of a child who is largely her. After years of being shut up inside a library going crazy inside my head, I got sick of the whole exercise as a merry-go-round of narcissistic and masochistic head games. Reading the documents, Maud Bailey learns that rather than being related to LaMotte's sister, as she has always believed, she is directly descended from LaMotte and Ash's illegitimate daughter.