Possession: A Romance

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But she adds something else also, something that's hard to put your finger on, a uniqueness, an edge, if you will, that puts this work in a class of it's own. This time though, I focused on Byatt’s poetry and discovered just how much it enriched and influenced the novel’s dual plots. This habit of pulling us on with one hand while doing everything she can to divert and distract with the other naturally feeds into that.

Beneath this quest-theme there is a thoroughly elaborated postmodern layer, ful of comments on the relationship between language and reality, and especially on the relationship between historical study and what really happened. There's a fascinating fight over spiritual beliefs that I don't have the headspace to deal with now, but is haunting the back of my head, and I expect to be obsessed with it the next time I read it. 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. Randolph Henry Ash's Proserpine had been seen as a Victorian reflection of religious doubt, a meditation on the myths of Resurrection.It sends up academics of all stamps (dusty, thrusting, shy, ambitious, greedy, gender-obsessed, sex-obsessed, celibate). Roland and Maud come across as real (if not as enthralling) as the poets and their story drives the mystery forward to its solution. Leonora, it seems to me, is so much larger than life, and I have to wonder if the character got away from Byatt, if perhaps, she had been intended to be more of "bad" critic than she is. The text was taken apart and formed into whatever the accidental school held as its dogma, as it’s ideology.

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! I mean, just to rattle off a few: feminism, post-modernism, living in a post-modern world, deconstructionism, many many issues of religion and spirituality, cultural relativism and archetypes, living in a globalized world, negotiating the self in relationships, the academic life and petty infighting, etc, etc. For my true thoughts have spent more time in your company than in anyone else’s, these last two or three months, and where my thoughts are, there am I, in truth, even if- like the May, only a threshold-presence, by decree.Byatt, in part, wrote Possession in response to John Fowles' novel The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969). I go to books to remind myself that beauty exists and it is worth something and it is a part of me, no matter how much I forget that sometimes. 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.

Maud and Roland also discover that Mortimer Cropper, a particularly stubborn and selfish academic, intends to dig up Ash's grave as he believes that further letters may have been buried with him. It has not often been given to me as a poet, it is perhaps not often given to human beings, to find such ready sympathy, such wit and judgment together. Do people really hate poetry so much that they're skipping a few pages of it in the middle of a story? He and LaMotte had a short, passionate affair; it led to the suicide of LaMotte's companion (and possibly lover), Blanche Glover, and the secret birth of LaMotte's illegitimate daughter during a year spent in Brittany.

Maybe it is just the subject matter- I don't know how you avoid pretentiousness when you're writing about overeducated Victorian people with literary tendencies. I know it is usual in these circumstances to protest- “I love you for yourself alone”- “I love you essentially”- and as you imply, my dearest, to mean by “you essentially”, lips and hands and eyes. And there was a pleasure to be had from reading the sentences Ash had read, touched with his fingers, scanned with his eyes. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. It was the smell of the aftermath, a green smell, a smell of shredded leaves and oozing resin, of crushed wood and splashed sap, a tart smell, which bore some relation to the smell of bitten apples.