Randolph Henry Ash is thought to have been a dour, humorless Victorian gentleman and Christabel LaMotte to have lived isolated from the world with her friend Blanche Glover. Finding that their placid lives were interrupted by a passionate affair leads to a reinterpretation of their poetry and a dispute over the ownership of their love letters discovered by scholars Roland Michell and Maud Bailey. Roland and Maud spend months traveling about England and France assembling the scattered pieces of the puzzle. Their own romantic relationship develops even more slowly than that of their predecessors.

In her fifth novel, Byatt does not simply create Ash and Christabel but their poems and letters, the journals of several people close to them, and commentaries of modern critics. POSSESSION offers an ironic view of the past in the tradition of John Fowles’ THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT’S WOMAN; a romance with strongly gothic elements; a detective story; and a serious exploration of the hold of the past on the present.

Byatt comments on a myriad of subjects including feminism, sexuality, the nature of literary criticism and biography, infighting among English and American academics, the decline of the English gentry, and the landscape of Yorkshire. The novel’s title refers to the efforts of literary scholars to possess their subjects, including any artifacts relating to them; the sexual passion that leads one person to be possessed by another; and the impossibility of anyone truly possessing another person. POSSESSION, which won the most prestigious literary prizes in Great Britain and Ireland, is one of the most entertaining serious novels of recent years.

Bibliography

Bradbury, Malcolm, and David Palmer, eds. The Contemporary English Novel. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1980. The preface addresses Byatt’s importance among her contemporaries.

Campbell, Jane. “The Hunger of the Imagination in A. S. Byatt’s The Game.” Critique 29, no. 3 (Spring, 1988): 147-162. Although the article discusses an earlier novel, it addresses Byatt’s emblematic style and concern with failures in communication.

Campbell, Jane. “‘The Somehow May be Thishow’: Fact, Fiction, and Intertextuality in Antonia Byatt’s ‘Precipice-Encurled.’” Studies in Short Fiction 28, no. 2 (Spring, 1991): 115-123. Discusses connections between this short story in Sugar and Possession in their use of Victorian poetry, a mix of fact and fiction, and thematic relationships of art and life.

Cosslett, Tess. “Childbirth from the Woman’s Point of View in British Women’s Fiction: Enid Bagnold’s The Squire and A. S. Byatt’s Still Life.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 8 (Fall, 1989): 263-286. Discussion of motherhood as metaphor in women’s fiction suggests similarities to Christabel’s experience in Possession.

Giobbi, Giuliana. “Sisters Beware of Sisters: Sisterhood as a Literary Motif in Jane Austen, A. S. Byatt, and I. Bossi Fedrigotti.” Journal of European Studies 22 (September, 1992): 241-258. Provides a larger context for the sisterhood motif in Possession.

Jenkyns, Richard. “Disinterring Buried Lives.” The Times Literary Supplement, March 2, 1990, 213-214. This unusually detailed review praises the many styles and voices in Possession and compares it with Alison Lurie’s The Truth About Lorin Jones.

Karlin, Danny. “Prolonging Her Absence.” London Review of Books 12 (March 8, 1990): 17-18. This review tries to identify the Victorian models for the poetry in Possession.

Miles, Rosalind. The Female Form: Women Writers and the Conquest of the Novel. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987. In her discussion of “Lady Novelists and Honorary Men,” Miles traces the degeneration of romance and refers to Byatt’s description in Degrees of Freedom (1965) of modern romances as providing consolation. An important formal context for the history of the romance by women writers.

Showalter, Elaine. A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977. Showalter associates Byatt with other women novelists, including Charlotte Bronte, Iris Murdoch, and Byatt’s sister Margaret Drabble, who share a concern with the ethical considerations of writing novels.