Reading Order
Possession: A RomancePossession Reading Order
Possession: A Romance (1990) by A.S. Byatt is the Booker Prize-winning novel that is both the most celebrated academic novel in English and one of the great love stories — a double love story, in fact: Roland Michell, a contemporary scholar, discovers letters suggesting that the Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash (modeled partly on Browning) had a secret affair with the poet Christabel LaMotte (modeled partly on Christina Rossetti and Emily Dickinson), and as Roland and the Christabel scholar Maud Bailey investigate the affair, they fall in love themselves. Byatt wrote fake Victorian poems, letters, and journals to create Ash and LaMotte — the fabricated Victorian material is in itself an extraordinary achievement — and embedded them in a contemporary academic mystery. Possession is simultaneously a love story, a detective story, a Victorian pastiche, a meditation on literary scholarship, and a philosophical investigation of the relationship between the past and the present, the dead and the living, possession in all its senses (being possessed by passion, by another person, by the past, by material objects that carry history).
Where to start
Possession: A Romance (1990) — the complete novel. The Victorian poetry and letters Byatt wrote for Ash and LaMotte are part of the reading experience and should be read as they appear in the novel. Byatt's other major works in a similar vein: The Children's Book (2009) is her most recent long novel and equally rich with historical period reconstruction; The Biographer's Tale (2000) is shorter and more formally experimental
Complete Possession: A Romance Book List
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Possession: A Romance
A.S. Byatt·1990
Possession: A Romance — Frequently Asked Questions
What is Possession by A.S. Byatt about?
Possession follows two parallel love stories. In the contemporary strand, Roland Michell (a literary scholar working on the archive of the Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash) discovers letters that suggest Ash had a secret affair with the poet Christabel LaMotte — a relationship that has left no trace in either poet's biography. Roland contacts Maud Bailey, a scholar specializing in LaMotte, and together they investigate the affair, following the lovers' trail across England and France, discovering more letters, journals, and eventually a cache of correspondence at the seaside village of Whitby. As they investigate, Roland and Maud fall in love. The Victorian strand presents, through the discovered documents, the actual love story of Ash and LaMotte: their meeting, correspondence, secret journey together, and its consequences for both poets (including an illegitimate child). The novel's resolution involves both the contemporary scholars' love story and the academic revelation of what the Victorian relationship actually was. Byatt invented all the Victorian material — the poems, letters, journals — and embedded it in the contemporary detective framework; reading Possession means reading two different kinds of Victorian pastiche alongside a contemporary academic thriller.
Is the Victorian poetry in Possession real or invented?
All the Victorian poetry, letters, and journals in Possession are invented by A.S. Byatt. Randolph Henry Ash (modeled partly on Robert Browning, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and Gerard Manley Hopkins) and Christabel LaMotte (modeled partly on Christina Rossetti and Emily Dickinson) are fictional poets, and the poems, letters, and journals that Byatt invents for them are among the most extraordinary formal achievements in contemporary English fiction. Byatt wrote enough poetry in each poet's style to make their voices and aesthetic concerns distinct and convincing — Ash's Victorian dramatic monologue 'The Garden of Proserpina' and LaMotte's fairy tale poem 'Melusina' are substantial works in themselves. The invention of this material required Byatt to master two very different Victorian poetic traditions and write enough in each voice to be convincing. Many readers of Possession have subsequently sought out the poets Byatt was drawing on (particularly Browning and Christina Rossetti) to see the originals that inspired Byatt's inventions.
What does 'possession' mean in the title of Byatt's novel?
Byatt's subtitle is 'A Romance,' and the title 'Possession' operates on multiple levels simultaneously. The most obvious is the detective-story sense: Roland and Maud are trying to recover and 'possess' (in the scholarly sense of holding and understanding) the letters and documents that constitute the Victorian love affair. But possession also means being possessed — by passion (both the Victorian lovers and the contemporary scholars are progressively 'possessed' by each other, consumed by desire they cannot control), by the past (Roland and Maud are possessed by the Victorian love story they are investigating; the dead poets' lives invade and reshape their own), and by material objects (the letters, the poems, the lock of hair — material objects that carry the past into the present and 'possess' those who hold them). Byatt is also playing on Romantic ideas of artistic possession — the poet possessed by the Muse — and on the legal sense of possession as ownership. The Victorian love affair was conducted in secret precisely because LaMotte, as an unmarried woman, would have been legally 'possessed' (owned) by Ash if she had accepted his offer of conventional relationship.
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