Product Description

Possession is an exhilarating novel of wit and romance, at once a literary detective novel and a triumphant love story. It is the tale of a pair of young scholars investigating the lives of two Victorian poets.Following a trail of letters, journals and poems they uncover a web of passion, deceit and tragedy, and their quest becomes a battle against time.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6807 in Books
• Published on: 1991-02-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 528 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
"Literary critics make natural detectives", says Maud Bailey, heroine of a mystery where the clues lurk in university libraries, old letters and dusty journals. Together with Roland Michell, a fellow academic and accidental sleuth, Maud discovers a love affair between the two Victorian writers the pair has dedicated their lives to studying: Randolph Ash, a literary great long assumed to be a devoted and faithful husband, and Christabel La Motte, a lesser- known "fairy poetess" and chaste spinster. At first, Roland and Maud's discovery threatens only to alter the direction of their research, but as they unearth the truth about the long- forgotten romance, their involvement becomes increasingly urgent and personal. Desperately concealing their purpose from competing researchers, they embark on a journey that pulls each of them from solitude and loneliness, challenges the most basic assumptions they hold about themselves, and uncovers their unique entitlement to the secret of Ash and La Motte's passion.

Winner of the 1990 Booker Prize, Possession is a gripping and compulsively readable novel. A.S. Byatt exquisitely renders a setting rich in detail and texture. Her lush imagery weaves together the dual worlds that appear throughout the novel--the worlds of the mind and the senses, of male and female, of darkness and light, of truth and imagination--into an enchanted and unforgettable tale of love and intrigue. --Lisa Whipple

Review
'As always, Byatt wields beautiful prose, and the mix of prose and poetry gives the book a sensuality as mysterious as anything in the plot', Elizabeth Kostova, .'Intelligent, ingenious and humane', Times Literary Supplement

Booker Prize Winner 1990. When the love letters of Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte, Victorian poets, are discovered, rival academics Maud Bailey and Roland Mitchell combine forces to solve the mystery of their parting, in the process uncovering an even greater enigma. Possession benefits from Byatt's abiding interest in Victorian poetry - she has, for example, edited collections of Robert Browning - and the pastiches of poetry and letters which she creates for the blighted lovers, and uses to propel their narrative, are of an unparalleled fluency and plausibility. Mitchell and Bailey's own story echoes the melodrama and excitement of Ash and LaMotte's, mimicking the scope of a Victorian novel. The novel's popularity with critics and a wider public is justified: it is deeply researched, and the fruits of that knowledge of Victorian literature and mores are made accessible to the general reader, and both sets of narratives are utterly gripping. (Kirkus UK)

Cosmopolitan
'a triumphant success on every level – as a critique of Victorian poetry, an unbearably moving love story and a satire on the modern "Biography Industry"’