Possession (Masterplots II: Women’s Literature Series)
At a glance:
- Author: A. S. Byatt
- First Published: 1990
- Type of Work: Novel
- Type of Plot: Romance
- Time of Work: The 1980’s, alternating with the 1870’s and 1880’s
- Setting: London, Lincolnshire, and North Yorkshire, England, and the Breton coast in France
- Principal Characters: Randolph Henry Ash, Christabel LaMotte, Ellen Ash, Balnche Glover, Roland Mitchell, Maud Bailey, James Blackadder, Beatrice Nest, Leonora Stern, Mortimer Cropper
- Genres: Long fiction, Historical fiction, Gothic fiction
- Subjects: Values, France or French people, Homosexuality or homosexuals, Love or romance, Suicide, Nineteenth century, Literature, Poetry or poets, 1980’s, England or English people, Lesbianism or lesbians, Letter writing, London, Letters, Learning or scholarship, Research, Victorian era or Victorianism, Museums, Fables
- Locales: London, England, Yorkshire, England, Lincolnshire, England, Breton coast, France
Form and Content
Possession: A Romance opens with an epitaph from “The Garden of Proserpina” by the Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash which describes how Hercules will “Come to his dispossession and the theft.” Proserpina is the Greek queen of death, so the hero is stealing life from death when he “dispossesses” her garden of its golden apples. So too will Ash’s contemporary double, Roland Mitchell, find a “golden apple” in the London Library and “dispossess” that institution of two rough drafts of a love letter written by Ash a century...
[The entire page is 2263 words long]
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