Possession
by A. S. Byatt
Summary
Roland Mitchell is an underemployed academic working on the Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash. In a library copy of a book Ash owned, he finds two drafts of an unsent letter to an unnamed woman, and steals them. The woman turns out to be Christabel LaMotte, a minor poet with her own small scholarly following, whose leading expert is a chilly academic called Maud Bailey.
The two of them set out to establish whether Ash and LaMotte, both apparently settled elsewhere, had an affair, and the novel alternates between their pursuit and the nineteenth century story itself, told in letters, journals, poems and fairy tales that Byatt wrote entirely herself. There are hundreds of lines of invented Victorian verse in here, and they are good.
It is a detective story about scholarship, a satire on the academic profession and its funding, and a genuine romance in both centuries at once, and it manages all three without strain.
Be warned that the invented poems are long and some readers skip them, losing a good deal. It is also unashamedly a book for people who like books, thick with reference and pleased with itself in a way that either charms or grates. If you enjoy Victorian fiction and have ever set foot in an archive, few novels are more purely satisfying.
At around five hundred pages it is a genuine commitment, and the modern sections are the weaker half. Persevere anyway: the Victorian correspondence at the centre is some of the best pastiche ever written, and the final chapter is worth everything preceding it.
Historical Context & Significance
Possession won the Booker Prize in 1990, A.S. Byatt's fifth novel, and became one of the prize's genuine commercial successes, selling in very large numbers on both sides of the Atlantic.
Its subtitle is A Romance, which Byatt intended in the older sense of the word rather than the bookshop one, and the novel's structure of a modern quest wrapped around an invented Victorian archive was widely imitated afterwards.
Byatt was already an established critic and academic, and the satire on literary theory and on American research funding was read at the time as pointed. A 2002 film adaptation with Gwyneth Paltrow and Aaron Eckhart necessarily dropped most of the poetry. Her sister, the novelist Margaret Drabble, was a rival in a long and public family froideur that reviewers rarely failed to mention.