A. S. Byatt's beloved novel--winner of the Booker Prize and an
international best seller--is a spellbinding intellectual mystery and an
utterly transfixing love story.
Roland Michell and Maud Bailey are young academics in the 1980s
researching the lives of two Victorian literary figures: the major poet
Randolph Henry Ash and the lesser-known "fairy poetess" Christabel
LaMotte. After coming across hints of a long-buried and potentially
explosive secret in the poets' letters and journals, Maud and Roland
join forces to track their subjects' movements from London to Yorkshire
to Brittany, tracing clues embedded in poems and hunting down evidence
in dusty archives and in a freshly opened grave. Their eagerness to
uncover the truth draws the two lonely scholars together, but what they
discover will have implications they could not have imagined.
An extraordinary counterpoint of passions and ideas, POSSESSION is woven
throughout with invented historical documents and poetry of dazzling
richness and depth, bringing Byatt's Victorian characters vividly to
life. The result is both a gripping story and a brilliant exploration of
the nature of love and obsession--and of what we can know about the
past.
Introduction by Philip Hensher