earlier, will not let him read the letter and buries it with him.

Cropper reveals the letters’ existence, and a national debate begins over their import and the need to keep them in England. Cropper and Rildebrand Ash, last of the Ash line, decide to dig up the poet’s grave and solve the last piece of the mystery. After finding the box containing the letter, Cropper and Ash are almost killed in a storm. As the storm ends, they are confronted by the other Ash-LaMotte scholars. Maud is given the honor of reading the letter, which reveals that the child, Maia, also known as May, lived and was reared as the daughter of Christabel’s sister, making her Maud’s great-great- great-grandmother. Maud and Roland finally confess their love.

Byatt’s method of presenting her twin stories is as noteworthy as the other elements of Possession. She has created not only Christabel and Ash but their works as well. Her narrative consists of the modern story told from several points of view, flashbacks to the nineteenth century, the poems (some rather extensive) and letters of Christabel and Ash, Christabel’s prose fables, the journals of Ellen, Blanche, and Sabine (the latter the most stylish and enthralling of the narratives), Blanche’s suicide note, and commentaries by others on the works of the Victorian writers. These commentaries include those by fictional characters as well as those of real-life writers such as Algernon Charles Swinburne and F R. Leavis.

The most admirable of Byatt’s many achievements is her ability to create a distinctive voice and style for each of her writers. Christabel and Ash write appropriately dense, allusive Victorian poetry; Leonora writes in an equally difficult structuralist-feminist style.

A genre Byatt exploits is the mystery or detective novel. Maud says, “Literary critics make natural detectives,” and she and Roland painstakingly track down clues that will unlock the complicated secrets of the past. Byatt drops numerous hints—and some red herrings—to force the reader to participate in the unraveling. At the beginning of the novel, Roland thinks that he knows and understands Ash but recognizes in the portrait of the pcet by Edouard Manet “an almost teasing aspect, a challenge: ’So you think you know me?’” Sabine’s journal ends with Christabel receiving a letter but not opening it, and Byatt allows the reader to decide what it is. Christabel tells Ash, “You have made a murderess of me,” one of many suggestions that her baby is dead. (Actually, she is referring to Blanche’s suicide.)

The unreliability of the apparent truth is one of the themes of Possession. Ellen edits her journal to prevent the “ghouls and vultures” from uncovering matters she wants left unknown. She does not know that other sources provide the details that she chooses to exclude. Maud articulates Byatt’s point that everything, finally, is connected: “I suppose one studies … literature because all these connections seem both endlessly exciting and then in some sense dangerously powerful—as though we held a clue to the true nature of things.”

One of the virtues of Possession is the strength of its characterizations. Roland has the potential to be a good scholar but fails in most other areas of his life. Re is so obsessed with Ash and literature in general that he is blind to Val’s needs, to his exploitation of her. He acts without thinking, getting so involved in the pursuit of the correspondence that he loses Val and his job in the Ash Factory. While Maud considers him “a gentle and unthreatening being,” Byatt bemoans a world in which such qualities are not considered virtues. Roland changes gradually over the course of his investigation, becoming less self-centered, going from hating his landlady’s fifteen cats to caring for them when she becomes ill. He experiences a sort of epiphany, deciding that he can become a poet and create his own art rather than attempt to possess another’s. Maud is presented as aloof and untouchable, using her work as an escape from the messy details of life. Like her ancestor, she is often compared to a princess and resembles the otherworldly women in pre-Raphaelite paintings. She covers her luxurious hair as if she feared her sexuality. In pursuing the truth about Christabel, she is for the first time taking a chance on something she cannot control. She is drawn to Roland because she realizes that they share deficiencies.

Randolph and Ellen Ash illustrate how people hide their inner lives. There is a contrast between “the ferocious vitality” of Ash’s poetry and the guarded dullness of his non-Christabel letters, the only apparent record of the private man. As the truth about him and Christabel is revealed, Ash evolves from icon to man, from lofty observer of the intellectual life of his time to understandably flawed human. He would not be the poet he is without the influence of Christabel, whom he calls his muse. He is attracted to her because she refuses to fit the Victorian mold of the compliant female. Ellen has allowed herself to play this role in part to make up to Ash for never consummating their marriage because of her fear of sex (one of several facts withheld from the twentieth century characters). She admits to herself that her life is a lie, that Christabel is “in one sense his true wife.”

Like Ash, Christabel is thought not to have had a life beyond her work. She recalls Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s unfinished “Christabel” (1816), for the complete truth can never be known about her: “I am my own riddle.” Enigmatic on one level and transparent on another, she resembles the mythical half-woman, half-snake Melusina, who marries a mortal to gain a soul only to be betrayed. Yet she is the one to abandon Ash. Sabine perceives some of Christabel’s complexity, comparing her with “the romantic Jane Eyre, so powerful, so passionate, so observant beneath her sober exterior.” Christabel, like Maud, discovers an unexpected need to take risks. According to Blanche, “Independent women must expect more of themselves, since neither men nor other more conventionally domesticated women will hope for anything, or

expect any result other than utter failure.” In the context of the complicated events in Possession, such an observation is both true and oversimplified.

The novel’s ironic title refers to the subplot about the battle over the legal ownership of the Ash-LaMotte correspondence, the loss of self-control through sexual passion, and, more important, the futile efforts of one person to possess another. Ash recognizes this: “He would teach her that she was not his possession, he would show her she was free.” Keeping their child a secret is an attempt to assure her freedom. Christabel gives up May, in part, for this same reason, only to endure the pain of watching the girl grow up as her indifferent niece. Roland eventually sees that neither he nor anyone else has a right to the letters and their secrets: “Ash had not written the letters for Roland or for anyone else but Christabel LaMotte. Roland’s find had turned out to be a sort of loss.” No one, finally, comes close to possessing the truth. A postscript reveals that Ash knew of May’s existence and even met her once. In slowly peeling back layer upon layer of her complex, romantic tale, Byatt dramatizes the mysterious hold of the past on the present.

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.

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 earlier.

This pattern of character doubles, the relationships between literature and actions, and the meanings of “possession” continue to form and inform the novel. By claiming possession of these “living words,” Roland has initiated a romantic quest that will unite contemporary actions with words from the Victorian lovers, Ash and Christabel LaMotte. This heritage of love transforms the future as it is relived by Roland and Maud Bailey, Christabel’s contemporary double.

Roland and Maud follow a paper trail of letters, poetry, diaries, tales, and journals to discover the secret meetings and subsequent parting of the Victorians. Their journey takes them to Christabel’s last home in Lincolnshire, now held by Sir George and Lady Joan Bailey; near the North Sea to Whitby, where the lovers spend a month; and to Breton in France, where her cousin Sabine’s journal records the birth and subsequent disappearance of Christabel’s child.

As Roland and Maud begin their romantic quest, other characters will turn it into a race, a chase, and a detective story, all forms of the romance. Most will find more than they bargained for as the quest for knowledge is revealed to be a quest for love. They will learn more about themselves and about one another in the process of learning about love.

Women particularly need to be opened to love, the novel reveals, because their stories often remain hidden in a patriarchal society. For example, Christabel’s pas-sion creates a hybrid art, captured in the symbol of Melusina, half woman and half monster. In her life, it results from suffering, isolation, and the suicide of her friend Blanche Glover. Christabel herself will end her days as a “witch” in the family attic, while her attempts at direct communication will be buried with another woman’s secrets.

Each character learns from the others. James Blackadder will join the race to save the relics of Ash for his “Ash Factory,” while Leonora Stern sternly demands the feminist appreciation of Christabel’s art. When the two begin to appreciate each other, their English and American, male and female differences can be embraced in the marriage of their ideas. Beatrice Nest joins the quest to protect the secrets of Ellen Ash, whose journals record her hidden story in cryptic riddles. Beatrice, too, will learn that when books are shared and graves are opened to the air, only the dead past crumbles away.

Only Mortimer Cropper remains opposed to the living past, as his deathly name suggests. Wanting only to possess relics to bury in his museum, Cropper enlists the aid of Ash’s descendant Hildebrand Ash in his attempt to claim legal possession. After surviving a gothic night of storms and grave-robbing, the questers find themselves together in the Rowan Tree Inn. Cropper opens the relics, within which the others find the end of one love story and the beginning of their own, their living heritage. Yet even they do not know the whole story, for the past keeps some secrets, and Byatt suggests that the marriage of true minds might sometimes survive body and soul.

The winner of England’s coveted Booker Prize, Possession is the best known of Byatt’s novels. Her empathy for the hidden, cryptic, and silenced stories of women fills it with insights into private lives and understanding of the wordless stories of nature. Christabel has been compared to Emily Dickinson and also resembles Christina Rossetti, not only in her sisterly attachment to Blanche Glover, which recalls “Goblin Market,” but also to the suggestive love poems of that other “spinster” poet.

In Possession, as in life, most women accept the comfort of small houses or the protective silences within a patriarchal marriage in order to avoid exposure. The unmarried woman is vulnerable; to feel safe, even the contemporary professor Maud Bailey must hide her beautiful hair and surround herself with icy perfection.

Even sisters are not always supportive; after love draws Christabel out into the open, Blanche considers herself “superfluous” and commits suicide. Later, Christabel will put herself into Ellen Ash’s hands to reach out to a dying Ash, but Ellen decides to take that truth to her grave.

Gothic elements explore demonic possession when women are tempted to betray social definitions or rational desires. In Ash’s poem “Mummy Possess’t,” he takes on a female voice to explain that “we Women have no Power/ in the cold world of objects Reason rules” and presents spiritualism as the way women can gain knowledge, a threshold to a “negative world” of the “Unseen/ Unheard, Impalpable, and Unconfined.” Only in such a world do women find the power to possess, briefly, the objects of their love. Christabel compares herself to a worm kept in a jar to be studied; it too is “Possessed of a Restless Demon—or hatred of Jar-panopticons,” much as her own passion will not remain confined in the safe imprisonment of a small house or the social roles allowed women.

Even in the supposed immortality of art, Christabel receives little attention until she is rediscovered by Byatt’s contemporary feminists. The balance Ash could achieve did not come easily to Christabel, as he himself suggests when she will not respond to his letters and he guesses that it might be “out of sudden hatred, at the injustice of the different fates of men and women.”

Despite these depressing realities, Possession remains a comedy, precisely because of its allegiance to the cyclical story of nature, the story of continuous rebirth and the possibilities of love even from the ashes and embers of a seemingly dead past. Women’s literature has often been written from the communal perspective of this neglected and devalued mode, reminding one that the whole of life is greater than any fragmentation of its rich diversity and that therefore love can still outweigh fear.

Possession uniquely blends literary techniques by narrating two intertwined stories at once. The Victorian tale employs various Victorian narrative methods, while the contemporary story aligns with the popular adventure genre.

The Victorian narrative unfolds mainly through the letters, diaries, and literary creations of its characters, with occasional omniscient narration. Richard Jenkyns, in his review for the Times Literary Supplement, particularly lauded Byatt's skill in crafting the letters and poems. This epistolary approach effectively develops the lovers' characters and traces the evolution of their relationship.

By subtitling the book "A Romance," Byatt alludes not only to the love stories but also to the adventure undertaken by Roland and Maud. Their journey, which takes them across England and into France, involves following a series of clues. Unlike the other modern characters who have varied reasons for their interest in the Victorian writers, Roland and Maud are on a scholarly quest for truth; unexpectedly, they also discover personal rewards, including their developing relationship with each other.

Another technique that enhances Byatt's depiction of the Victorian era is the frequent reference to real historical figures alongside her fictional characters. For instance, at the novel's outset, Roland discovers Randolph's drafts of his initial letter to Christabel inside a real book, Giambattista Vico's Principles of a New Science of Nations. The letter mentions an encounter at the home of Crabb Robinson, a historical figure; Roland even speculates whether Randolph's enigmatic correspondent could be the Victorian poet Christina Rossetti. This blending of fictional characters with real individuals is particularly effective in this novel.

Set against the backdrop of both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Possession explores social issues prevalent in both time periods. The dual narratives emphasize both the commonalities and distinctions between these eras.

One significant social issue in the novel is the role of women. Victorian women had limited options within conventional society; some chose to live outside these societal constraints. However, none of the Victorian women find true happiness or fulfillment, highlighting the shortcomings of Victorian society. These characters face more internal pressures than external ones, having fully internalized their society's norms. In contrast, the modern female characters generally have more choices, but some still fall into traditional roles like "the woman behind the man" or "the damsel in distress." By the novel's conclusion, the young women manage to liberate themselves, forming relationships where they are valued for their equality and individuality.

Another intertwined social issue is sexuality. The Victorian married couple, the Ashes, endure a sexless marriage due to the wife's fear and ignorance of sex. Despite her husband's patience, she is unable to consummate the marriage, both on their honeymoon and thereafter. They remain married, as any other option would have been unacceptable in their society. To a modern reader, the unfairness to the husband, who had no reason to expect a sexless marriage, is apparent. After her husband's death, Ellen Ash realizes she spent her married life trying to compensate for the lack of sexual intimacy. She is contrasted with two other female characters: her housemaid and the poet who briefly becomes her husband's lover. Both women embrace their sexuality, become pregnant, and are consequently ostracized. Both male and female characters suffer due to their society's restrictive views on sexuality.

Modern characters experience much greater sexual freedom, thanks to a more tolerant society and the fact that sex no longer inevitably leads to childbirth. However, this freedom has not always led to greater happiness; many characters endure meaningless and unsatisfactory sexual relationships. Byatt illustrates that Victorian characters are unable to find happiness because their society prioritizes the institution of marriage, even if it is sexless or loveless, while love and sex outside of marriage are unacceptable. In contrast, modern characters have the freedom to form personal relationships on their own terms.

Possession is frequently likened to John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969), due to both novels featuring a Victorian backdrop and a somewhat similar pair of lovers. However, many making this comparison appear to be thinking of the film adaptation of Fowles's novel. In the movie, the Victorian story is paralleled with modern actors portraying the Victorian characters, thus highlighting the contrast between the two eras. Both stories involve a Victorian man torn between a proper fiancée or wife and an unconventional woman who becomes his lover. Despite this, Possession is often lauded for its originality. Its sense of familiarity seems to stem more from Byatt's use of Victorian novel techniques and her Victorian characters than from any direct connection to a specific earlier novel.

The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye: Five Fairy Stories (1994), a collection of short stories, includes two tales from Possession: "The Glass Coffin" and "Gode's Story." Readers had often requested these stories to be published separately, as they were popular parts of Possession.

"The Conjugial Angel," the second novella in Angels & Insects (1992), is the work of Byatt that most closely resembles Possession. Both share a nineteenth-century setting, an interest in spiritualism, a mix of real and fictional characters, and a literary focus, particularly on Tennyson and his poem In Memoriam.

Babel Tower (1996) employs a book-within-a-book structure with Babbletower, similar to the technique used in Possession. Byatt contrasts the main story with the framed narrative, illustrating a society grappling with new values, much like the juxtaposition of Victorian and modern values in Possession.

A shortened version of the novel can be found on Random House Audio-books. Alan Howard narrates it on two cassettes.