Possession: A Romance

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This habit of pulling us on with one hand while doing everything she can to divert and distract with the other naturally feeds into that. My initial reaction here is 5 stars for pulling off a complicated structure surrounding romantic stories of 2 pairs of poets.

Randolph Henry Ash's Proserpine had been seen as a Victorian reflection of religious doubt, a meditation on the myths of Resurrection. Yet more impressive are in excess of 1,700 lines of original poetry, generally set at a pitch of intensity worthy of the pre-Raphaelites and dripping in allusion and metaphor.Byatt, in part, wrote Possession in response to John Fowles' novel The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969). is a tour de force that opens every narrative device of English fiction to inspection without, for a moment, ceasing to delight. Winner of England's Booker Prize and the literary sensation of the year, Possession is an exhilarating novel of wit and romance, at once an intellectual mystery and a triumphant love story. One of the most important scenes is at the end, when Michell rediscovers what brought him into the English department to start with: poetry.

I am convinced that you must undertake that grand Fairy Topic--you will make something highly strange and original of it. 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. Ash liked his characters at or over the edge of madness, constructing systems of belief and survival from the fragments of experience available to them. which reveal a hitherto unknown, and clearly affectionate, attachment between Ash and a woman not his wife.

Possession is an exhilarating novel of wit and romance, at once a literary detective novel and a triumphant love story. 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.

The story could have been told without it, but I do think it would have lessened the impact to have had the poems discussed so frequently and never have seen any of them. She is an intelligent and multi-talented author, and I was delighted to accompany her through the throes of Randolph Ash and Christabel LaMotte's love story to the last riveting moment. I wasn’t in it to find things I had never found before, to revisit a personal classic to explore ideas that I had left behind for the time when I was ready to connect with them in the way that they deserved. My initial reaction is that people often say that love implies possession, whereas I think the two are mutually exclusive.This novel is likely, for me, like drinking single-malt scotch in the summer: sometimes I do, but I rarely enjoy it. major discovery that could rescue his academic career as well as make a big dent in the field of Victorian poetry studies. But I did find it slow at times and she tends to digress a lot into descriptions that add very little to the story. 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.

There, Roland and Maud discover a large bundle of letters sent between Ash and LaMotte that detail their developing love. She uses the third person narrator not as an omniscent actor but as a means to bring her characters closer to the readers and allow them to reach their own conclusions. 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. I think it is quite difficult to maintain a story within a story, span different ages, and have all the characters seems real and interesting.

There were parts where I came up gasping for air, and parts that I danced over lightly, barely reading, except for letting the pieces of a well-known structure fall reassuringly into place. Before I realized what I was doing this, it was happening for years with my constant re-reads of parts of Guy Gavriel Kay novels.