Possession (Byatt)

Possession: A Romance
A.S. Byatt, 1990
Knopf Doubleday
576 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780679735908

Summary
Winner, 1991 Booker Prize

Possession is an exhilarating novel of wit and romance, at once an intellectual mystery and a triumphant love story. As a pair of young scholars research the lives of two Victorian poets, they uncover their letters, journals, and poems, and track their movements from London to Yorkshire—from spiritualist seances to the fairy-haunted far west of Brittany. What emerges is an extraordinary counterpoint of passion and ideas. (From the publisher.)

More
Roland Michell and Maud Bailey, two rather unfulfilled young literary scholars, unexpectedly become figures of romance as they discover a surprising link between the two poets on whom they are authorities.

Byatt deftly plays with literary genres—Romantic quest, campus satire, detective story, myth, fairy tale—as Maud and Roland become deeply involved in the unfolding story of a secret relationship between the Victorian poets Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte.

The young people's quest inevitably attracts the jealous attention of the competitive academic world, and all too soon the quest becomes a chase. Byatt's staggering technical ambition and her powerful romantic vision are tributes to the great Victorian age, which the novel brings to life. (From the publisher.)

The 2002 film stars Gwyenth Paltrow, Aaron Eckhart, Jeremy Northam and Jennifer Ehle. (Turgid, a good description.)

---

Author Bio
• Aka—Antonia Susan Drabble Byatt
• Birth—August 24, 1936
• Where—Sheffield, England, UK
• Education—B.A., Cambridge University; undergraduate
   work, Bryn Mawr College (USA) and Oxford University
• Awards—Booker Prize
• Currently—lives in London, England, and France

Dame Antonia Susan Duffy, DBE, known as A. S. Byatt is an English novelist, poet and Booker Prize winner. In 2008, The Times newspaper named her on their list of The 50 greatest British writers since 1945.

Byatt was born as Antonia Susan Drabble, the daughter of John Drabble and Kathleen Bloor, a scholar of Browning. Byatt was educated at Sheffield High School and the Quaker Mount School, and noted in an interview in 2009 "I am not a Quaker, of course, because I'm anti-Christian and the Quakers are a form of Christianity but their religion is wonderful—you simply sat in silence and listened to the nature of things." She went on to Newnham College, Cambridge, Bryn Mawr in the United States, and Somerville College, Oxford. Sister to novelist Margaret Drabble and art historian Helen Langdon, Byatt lectured in the Department of Extra-Mural Studies of London University (1962–71), the Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design and from 1972 to 1983 at University College London.

Writing
The story of a young girl growing up in the shadow of a dominant father, Byatt's first novel, The Shadow of the Sun was published in 1964. Her novel The Game (1967), charts the dynamics between two sisters and the family theme is continued in her quartet: The Virgin in the Garden (1978), Still Life (1985), Babel Tower (1996) and A Whistling Woman (2002). Still Life won the PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award in 1989.

Her quartet of novels is inspired by D. H. Lawrence, particularly The Rainbow and Women in Love. Describing mid-20th-century Britain, the books follow the life of Frederica Potter, a young female intellectual studying at Cambridge at a time when women were heavily outnumbered by men at that university, and then tracing her journey as a divorcee with a young son making a new life in London. Byatt says some of the characters in her fiction represent her "greatest terror which is simple domesticity [...] I had this image of coming out from under and seeing the light for a bit and then being shut in a kitchen, which I think happened to women of my generation." Like Babel Tower, A Whistling Woman touches on the utopian and revolutionary dreams of the 1960s. She describes herself as "a naturally pessimistic animal": "I don't believe that human beings are basically good, so I think all utopian movements are doomed to fail, but I am interested in them."

She has written critical studies of Iris Murdoch, who was a friend, mentor and a significant influence on her own writing. In those books and other works, Byatt alludes to, and builds upon, themes from Romantic and Victorian literature. She conceives of fantasy as an alternative to, rather than an escape from, everyday life, and it is often difficult to tell when the fantastic in her work actually represents the eruption of psychosis. "In my work", she notes "writing is always so dangerous. It's very destructive. People who write books are destroyers." Possession (1990) parallels the emerging relationship of two contemporary academics with the past of two (fictional) nineteenth century poets whom they are researching. It won the Man Booker Prize in 1990 and was made into a film in 2002. Her novel Angels & Insects also became a successful film, nominated for an Academy Award (1995). The Children's Book was shortlisted for the 2009 Man Booker Prize and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

On the role of writing in her life, she says: "I think of writing simply in terms of pleasure. It's the most important thing in my life, making things. Much as I love my husband and my children, I love them only because I am the person who makes these things. I, who I am, is the person that has the project of making a thing. Well, that's putting it pompously—but constructing. I do see it in sort of three-dimensional structures. And because that person does that all the time, that person is able to love all these people."

Personal life
A. S. Byatt married Ian Charles Rayner Byatt in 1959 and had a daughter, as well as a son who was killed in a car accident at the age of 11. The marriage was dissolved in 1969. She has two daughters with her second husband Peter John Duffy.

Byatt has famously been long engaged in a feud with her novelist sister Margaret Drabble over the writerly appropriation of a family tea-set. The pair seldom see each other and don't read each other's books.

Prizes and awards

    1986 PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award, for Still Life
    1987 Hon. Dlitt, Bradford
    1990 Booker Prize for Fiction, Possession: A Romance
    1990 CBE
    1990 Irish Times International Fiction Prize Possession: A Romance
    1991 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia Region, Best Book) Possession
    1991 Honorary Doctorate from the University of York
    1991 Honorary Doctorate from the University of Durham
    1992 Honorary Doctorate from the University of Nottingham
    1993 Honorary Doctorate from the University of Liverpool
    1994 Honorary Doctorate from the University of Portsmouth
    1995 Honorary Doctorate from the University of London
    1995 Premio Malaparte (Italy)
    1995 Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye
    1998 Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature, The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye
    1999 DBE
    1999 Hon. DLitt from the University of Cambridge
    2000 Hon. Fellow, London Institute
    2000 Honorary Doctorate from the University of Sheffield
    2004 Honorary Doctorate from the University of Kent
    2004 Fellow, University College London
    2002 Shakespeare Prize (Germany)
    2007 Honorary degree from the University of Winchester.
    2009 Blue Metropolis International Literary Grand Prix[6] (Canada)
    2009 Man Booker Prize, The Children's Book (shortlist)
    2010 Honorary Doctorate from the Leiden University
    2010 James Tait Black Memorial Prize, The Children's Book

---

Book Reviews
This cerebral extravaganza of a story zigzags with unembarrassed zest across an imaginative terrain bristling with symbolism and symmetries, shimmering with myth and legend, and haunted everywhere by presences of the past.... Possession is eloquent about the intense pleasures of reading. And, with sumptuous artistry, it provides a feast of them.
Sunday Times (London)

Byatt is the most formidably equipped of contemporary novelists.... The great merit of [her] writing...is that it continually engages the reader's mind.
Daily Telegraph (UK)

...A.S. Byatt's wonderfully extravagant novel...accomplishes its essential purpose. It makes one read and reflect on language and consider what it meant to another age. As Maud says to Roland, "we have to make a real effort of imagination to know hwat it felt like to be them, here, believeing in these things".... In Possession, Ms. Byatt has made that effort. And to a remarkable degree succeeded.
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt - New York Times

A masterpiece of wordplay and adventure, a novel that compares with Stendhal and Joyce.
Los Angeles Times

Two contemporary scholars, each studying one of two Victorian poets, reconstruct their subjects' secret extramarital affair through poems, journal entries, letters and modern scholarly analysis of the period.... [A]n ambitious and wholly satisfying work, a nearly perfect novel.
Publishers Weekly

(Audio version.) This Booker Prize-winning novel is a good candidate for an oral reading, and Virginia Leishman performs beautifully. A wonderful mix of poetry and posturing literary criticism, part mystery, part romance, this tale is an entertaining juxtaposition of the 19th and 20th centuries. Leishman's reading emphasizes this contrast as she elegantly modulates poetry and then clips her words in a businesslike manner when reading the 20th-century analyses of 19th-century poetry. Maud Bailey and Roland Mitchell, scholars of Christabel Lamotte and Randolph Henry Ash, are brought together and to life through the letters, diaries, and poetry of the two poets. Uncertain of their own identities, Bailey and Mitchell can easily lose themselves in the study of literature. We become as involved as the scholars through a judicious sampling of belles lettres and literary criticism, until finally Lamotte and Ash materialize and speak for themselves. The supporting characters are humorous stereotypes that Leishman portrays with various accents and annoying drawls to match their idiosyncrasies. Highly recommended. —Juleigh Muirhead Clark, John D. Rockefeller Jr. Lib., Williamsburg, VA
Library Journal

---

Discussion Questions
1. What is the significance of the novel's title? Do you think it has more than one meaning? What does the concept of "possession" mean to the novel's various characters, both modern and Victorian? How can possession be seen as the theme of the book?

2. Ash is nicknamed "the Great Ventriloquist" but this sobriquet could as easily be applied to Byatt herself. Why does Byatt use poetry to give away so many clues to the story? Are the poems a necessary and integral part of the novel or would it have worked just as well without them? Do you find that the poems in the novel succeed in their own right as poetry?

3. All the characters' names are carefully chosen and layered with meaning. What is the significance behind the following names: Roland Michell, Beatrice Nest, Sir George Bailey, Randolph Ash, Maud Bailey, Christabel LaMotte, Fergus Wolff? (Clues to the last three may be found in the poetry by Tennyson, Yeats, and Coleridge cited below.) Do any other names in the novel seem to you to have special meanings? How do the names help define, or confuse, the relationships between the characters?

4. The scholars in the novel see R. H. Ash as a specifically masculine, Christabel LaMotte as a specifically feminine, type of poet, just as Robert Browning and Christina Rossetti, the poets on whose work Ash's and LaMotte's are loosely based, were considered to be extreme examples of the masculine and feminine in literature. Do you feel that such a classification is valid? What is there about Ash's and LaMotte's diction and subject matter that fulfills our ideas of "masculine" and "feminine"? Do the poets themselves consciously enact masculine and feminine roles? Do you find that Christabel's poetry is presented as being secondary to Ash's? Or that the work of the two poets is complementary?

5. Ellen Ash wrote her journal as a "defence against, and a bait for, the gathering of ghouls and vultures" [p. 501]. Mortimer Cropper is literally presented as a ghoul, robbing the poet's grave. Beatrice Nest, on the other hand, wishes to preserve Christabel's final letter to Randolph unread. What is the fine line, if any, between a ghoulish intrusion upon the privacy of the dead, and the legitimate claims of scholarship and history? As much as the scholars have discovered, one secret is kept from them at the end and revealed only to the reader. What is that secret and what difference does it make to Roland's future?

6. Freedom and autonomy are highly valued both by Christabel and Maud. What does autonomy mean to each of these characters? In Christabel's day, it was difficult for women to attain such autonomy; is it still difficult, in Maud's? What does autonomy mean to Roland? Why does mutual solitude and even celibacy assume a special importance in his relationship with Maud?

7. The moment of crisis in the poets' lives, 1859, was a significant year, as it saw the publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species. The theory of natural selection delivered a terrible blow to the Victorians' religious faith and created a climate of uncertainty: "Doubt," says Christabel, "doubt is endemic to our life in this world at this time" [p. 182]. How does Byatt compare this spiritual crisis with that which has befallen Roland and Maud's generation, who are taught to believe that the "self" is illusory [p. 459]?

8. The fluffy Beatrice Nest is scorned by the feminist scholars who crave access to Ellen Ash's journal. Yet in her way Beatrice is as much a victim of "patriarchy" as any of the Victorian women they study. What is the double standard at work among these politically minded young people? Can Beatrice be seen as a "superfluous woman," like Blanche and Val? What, if anything, do these three women have in common?

9. Ash writes "Swammerdam" with a particular reader, Christabel LaMotte, in mind. Is Christabel's influence on Ash evident in the poem, and if so, how and where? How, in the poem, does Ash address his society's preoccupation with science and religion? How does he address his and Christabel's conflicting religious ideas? How does Christabel herself present these ideas in Melusine?

10. Why is Christabel so affected by Gode's tale of the miller's daughter? What are its parallels with her own life?

11. The fairy Melusine has, as Christabel points out, "two aspects—an Unnatural Monster—and a most proud and loving and handy woman" [p. 191]. How does Christabel make Melusine's situation a metaphor for that of the woman poet? Does Christabel herself successfully defy society's strictures against women artists, or does her awareness of the problem cripple her, either professionally or emotionally? At the end of her life she wonders whether she might have been a great poet, as she believes Ash was, if she had kept to her "closed castle" [p. 545]. What do you think?

12. Roland and Maud believe they are taking part in a quest. This is a classic element of medieval and nineteenth-century Romance, of which they are well aware. Aside from the quest, what other elements of Romance can be found in Maud and Roland's story? In Christabel and Randolph's? What other genres are exploited in the novel?

13. When he returns to his flat at the end of the novel, Roland decides there is "no reason why he should not go out into the garden" [p. 514]. What is the emotional significance of his finally entering the garden?

Poems that will enrich your understanding of Possession: Robert Browning, "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came," "My Last Duchess," "Porphyria's Lover," "Caliban Upon Setebos," "Bishop Blougram's Apology," "Mr. Sludge, the 'Medium'," "Andrea del Sarto," and "Fra Lippo Lippi"; Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "Christabel"; Andrew Marvell, "To His Coy Mistress," "The Garden"; Petrarch, Rime Sparse; Christina Rossetti, Poetical Works; Alfred, Lord Tennyson, "Merlin and Vivien" from Idylls of the King, In Memoriam, "Maud," "Mariana," "The Lady of Shallott"; W.B. Yeats, The Rose.
(Questions issued by publisher.)

top of page