Possession: A Romance

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It is a book about books, but in such a generous way that nearly everything books can be about is in here. This brings us to the second layer: beyond the love story and the poetry is a very ironic and good humored critique of the academia in the late 80s, early 90s - the extremely alienating postmodern fad as well as the „cultural/womens/etc“ studies that were developing at the time. But that doesn’t do byatt justice: she created two characters who are flesh and blood in their own right, and gave them poetic voices that are incredibly personalized… what a delight! 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.

This is the sort of read that cleans out all the nonsense from my brain and leaves me with what is essentially important again. That's a tad dramatic, but this book wasn't always the most fun to read even though I do appreciate everything Byatt accomplished. Critic Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, writing in The New York Times, noted that what he describes as the "wonderfully extravagant novel" is "pointedly subtitled 'A Romance'.I know there are plenty of arguments against it, but to me, it summed up my life in the grey zone between reality lived and consumed in fiction. Over the years I have read this book, my favorite character has gone from Maud to Leonora then to both. People keep writing reviews of this book and talking about how it was great except for all the boring poems which they skipped through. But there are things that I desperately want to save about the person that I can only be after work hours, which I have less and less time for.

In 'Possession' I used this kind of narrator deliberately three times in the historical narrative—always to tell what the historians and biographers of my fiction never discovered, always to heighten the reader's imaginative entry into the world of the text. An important message in Possession is that there will always be some distance between what historians know and what actually occurred.Commenting on the invented 'historical' texts he said their "effect is dazzling – and similarly ludic erudition is on display throughout. 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. There's real magic behind all the brainy trickery and an emotional journey on top of the academic quest.

There was no year on the letters, but they must necessarily come after the publication of Ash's dramatic poems, Gods, Men and Heroes, which had appeared in 1856 and had not, contrary to Ash's hopes and perhaps expectations, found favour with the reviewers, who had declared his verses obscure, his tastes perverse and his people extravagant and improbable. So sharing these fictional characters' possession is as close to a communal literary experience as I will ever get.That is the shit that started me down this path in the first place, that lead me to make choice after choice that I thought was going there, even if it went somewhere different. In short, the whole book is a gigantic tease – which is certainly satisfying on an intellectual level. This time around I very carefully studied the epigraphs leading off most of the chapters and all of the beautiful poetry included in the text. I'm going to have to go even further down the disgustingly adoring path and say that this is going to be a personal classic, for me. For me, Possession is like a bottle of wine or a box of really good chocolate (the really, expensive and sinfully good kind).

And, as the cover proclaims, it is a romance--a set of entwined love stories written with impossible precision and believability. qtd in Lisa Fletcher "Historical Romance, Gender and Heterosexuality: John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman and A. By far the largest single gathering was of course in the Stant Collection at Robert Dale Owen University in New Mexico, where Mortimer Cropper worked on his monumental edition of the Complete Correspondence of Randolph Henry Ash. In what becomes the most charming part of the story, Mitchell and Bailey steal away to a magnificent country house, not far from Lincoln, where LaMotte lived most of her life in seclusion. He first has to let the machine warm up, and then: "in the dim and hum of the extractor fan he took out the two letters and read them again.A remarkable feat of storytelling through prose and poetry that compares with nothing I have ever read before. Do people really hate poetry so much that they're skipping a few pages of it in the middle of a story? I am only 23, but I'm old enough to be mostly embarrassed for myself at 16 (though I still think parts of this book are smokin' sexy), and I do feel like I'm getting worlds and worlds more out of this book than I ever got back then, and I can see myself getting more and more as I grow older, as the characters do.