Possession

The Discovery

Possession begins with an act of academic transgression. Roland Mitchell, a junior scholar employed to research the canonical Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash, finds two draft letters tucked inside a book in the London Library — letters that suggest Ash was pursuing, with unusual ardour, an unknown woman. The letters are unsigned but the trail leads Roland to Christabel LaMotte, a lesser-known Victorian poet with a dedicated academic following of her own, and to Maud Bailey, the LaMotte scholar at Lincoln University who is the obvious person to approach about what Roland has found.

What Roland has actually found is a literary scandal and a career-defining discovery — evidence of an undisclosed relationship between two poets whose work has been read and published and argued over for more than a century without anyone suspecting the connection. He is also, immediately, a thief: he has pocketed the draft letters rather than reporting them, which puts him outside the law and the conventions of his profession simultaneously. Byatt establishes from the first pages that the novel is going to be about the ethics of possession as much as its pleasures. Roland possesses the letters. The letters describe a desire to possess. And both Roland and Maud are about to be possessed by their growing obsession with the story they are trying to reconstruct.

The professional stakes are high — academic careers in the humanities run on discoveries of this order — but Byatt keeps them in careful balance with the personal ones. Roland’s relationship with his live-in partner Val is faltering in the particular, colourless way of relationships that have outlasted their energy. Maud is professionally successful and personally guarded, separated from her feminism by a kind of intellectual armour. The Victorian story they are pursuing is also, it becomes increasingly clear, a story about them.

The Victorian Story

The formal achievement at the centre of Possession is Byatt’s invention of two complete Victorian poetic careers. Randolph Henry Ash writes in a mode suggestive of Robert Browning — long dramatic monologues, poems on mythological subjects, a vast metaphysical energy. Christabel LaMotte writes more quietly, in a mode closer to Christina Rossetti or Emily Dickinson — precise, formally various, with a strong Gothic and fairy-tale current. Both bodies of work are interpolated throughout the novel in substantial extracts, and both are convincing as Victorian poetry: not parody, not pastiche, but genuine imaginative reconstruction.

The Victorian narrative itself — the actual story of Ash and LaMotte’s relationship, reconstructed through their letters, journals, and the accounts of those around them — unfolds in chapters that alternate with the contemporary investigation. Byatt writes this strand in a Victorian prose style: longer sentences, more formal diction, a different relationship to interiority. The relationship between Ash and LaMotte begins in intellectual excitement and moves, slowly, toward the physical and the catastrophic, and the consequences of what passes between them extend forward into the present-day story in ways that neither Roland nor Maud fully understands until the novel’s climax.

Byatt is doing something genuinely difficult here: she is asking the reader to be moved by a relationship whose characters are fictional within the novel’s own fiction — people who never existed, reconstructed by other fictional people from documents that were themselves invented. The fact that it works — that Ash and LaMotte feel real, that their letters are genuinely affecting — is the measure of how completely Byatt inhabited her own conceit.

Possession and Scholarship

The title works in at least four directions simultaneously. There is the romantic possession — the desire to have and be had by another person — that drives both the Victorian and contemporary love stories. There is the scholarly possession — the way academics come to feel that their subjects belong to them, that Maud owns LaMotte and Roland owns Ash in some meaningful sense — that structures the professional competition running through the novel. There is the economic possession of the actual documents and manuscripts, which become the object of a literal race as American collectors and rival British scholars close in on what Roland and Maud have discovered. And there is the Gothic sense of possession — haunting, obsession, being taken over by something outside oneself — that inflects the novel’s more uncanny moments.

The romance between Roland and Maud, which develops slowly across the investigation, is constructed as a deliberate structural mirror to the Victorian romance. Both relationships begin in intellectual collaboration and move toward something more personal. But Byatt is careful to make the contemporary romance different in register from the Victorian one — less grand, more hesitant, shaped by decades of feminist theory and the professionalisation of emotion that comes with it. Roland and Maud have to undo a great deal of learned guardedness before they can feel anything simply, and the novel suggests that this is both a gain and a loss relative to the Victorians’ more direct access to romantic convention.

What Possession ultimately argues is that the urge to possess — whether a person, a text, or an interpretation — is inseparable from love and from scholarship, and that the desire to understand something completely is always shadowed by the awareness that complete understanding would somehow end the relation. The critics who fight over Ash and LaMotte’s legacy possess it in the only way available to them: partially, argumentatively, and with the secret knowledge that the subject always exceeds the scholarship.

Our rating: 4.1/5 — A Booker Prize winner that earns every page of its ambition, inventing a Victorian literary world compelling enough to make you mourn the poets who never existed.