The novel examines, in a humane way, the relationship of love with shame, daring and loss.Īlong the way we are treated to fairy stories, poetry, natural history and even Victorian spiritualism. The novel reflects the various meanings of the word possession, from the obsessive urge to possess, which drives some individuals to extreme behaviour to get what they want, to love itself. At the same time they are being pursued by other academics with their own interests in the story. What follows is a literary detective story, as Roland and Maud try to discover what really happened to Ash, LaMotte and Blanche. Maud recalls a poem by LaMotte and so solves one of the mysteries in the novel: Byatt must have enjoyed writing pastiche poetry long, wordy and worthy for Ash, and, in LaMotte's case, reminiscent of Emily Dickinson's. Since Possession was published, it has become quite fashionable for novels to slip between different times, but this was the first one I read and remains, for me, the best. The complexity of the novel lies in the virtuoso way that Byatt handles her large cast of characters in two centuries. As I come from Yorkshire, I always enjoy the descriptions of the walks along the moors and coast – the familiarity evokes a pleasurable sense of nostalgia.

They meet at a literary breakfast in a fashionable part of London and embark on an affair which becomes a personal tragedy for them both.īefore this downfall, they take the chance to slip away and go fossil-hunting and walking on the North Yorkshire moors, enjoying an illicit holiday posing as a married couple. He leafed through the chapter headings: 'From Venus Mount to the Barren Heath' 'Female Landscapes and Unbroken Waters, Impenetrable Surfaces' 'From the Fountain of Thirst to the Armorican Ocean Skin''Īt the heart of Possession is the love story between the poets Ash and LaMotte. began on his familiarisation with Christabel LaMotte. Women's studies come in for similar irreverant treatment: 'Roland. Realising the significance of the letters, he is desperate to possess them so he steals them, unleashing merry mayhem in the world of academic literature. The story opens when, purely by chance, Roland unearths fragments of two letters by Ash addressed to some unknown person. One significant year, LaMotte disappears for several months and Blanche commits suicide. It is supposed that they had an exclusive, possibly lesbian, relationship, and that LaMotte eventually died a childless spinster. Maud, who heads a women's studies department, is studying the poet Christabel LaMotte, who is known to have lived with her friend, Blanche.

Possession by as byatt