Possession: A Romance

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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.

Possession is certainly not what you would describe as a light read but the combination of the weaving story-lines and the detective part of the plot kept my interest and I ended up finishing this rather weighty book quicker than anticipated.e., that the common masses have received an education sufficient to understand the higher thinking of Literature. It’s the sort of work where I’ve felt the need to create an entirely separate daytime persona to feel brave enough and competent enough to get through the day, one that I consider separate from what I would consider myself. He was not sure that Miss Rossetti would have approved of Ash's theology, or of his sexual psychology. That is the shit that started me down this path in the first place, that lead me to make choice after choice that I thought was going there, even if it went somewhere different. That is the title of (fictional) Mortimer Cropper’s famous biography of (fictional) RHA, described in the quote at the top), but it applies to Byatt, too.

a b Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, Books of The Times; "When There Was Such a Thing as Romantic Love", The New York Times, 25 October 1990. 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. They uncover a large amount of information that will permanently change scholarship on LaMotte and Ash. Did you not find it as strange as I did, that we should so immediately understand each other so well?So was "The Tinker's Grace," purporting to be Bunyan's prison musings on Divine Grace, and so was Pedro of Portugal's rapt and bizarre declaration of love, in 1356, for the embalmed corpse of his murdered wife, I? Every brick breathed fresh air; each had been stripped and drenched with blow-torch and high-speed jet, so that the house lay revealed beneath its original skin. There are parts of this book that I have such a strong, bodily anchored memory of, that I have connected to so strongly that my body has a sense memory of what it should do at the time when I read those words.

I won't be so churlish as to give away the end, but a plenitude of surprises awaits the reader of this gorgeously written novel. And now near the end, “in the calm of mind all passion spent,” I think of you again with clear love.Plus, we hear so much about the poems and other peoples' interpretations of them its great to actually see the real things and judge for ourselves, and fits really well into the theme about people creating their own narratives out of the past according to their present needs, and I think reflects cleverly back on the reader.

The book sprang apart, like a box, disgorging leaf after leaf of faded paper, blue, cream, grey, covered with rusty writing, the brown scratches of a steel nib. Or is this perhaps a product of the over-excited brain of a middle-aged and somewhat disparaged poet, when he finds that his ignored, his arcane, his deviously perspicuous meanings, which he thought not meanings, since no one appeared able to understand them, had after all one clear-eyed and amused reader and judge? There are things that happen and leave no discernible trace, are not spoken of or written of, though it would be wrong to say that subsequent events go on indifferently, all the same, as though such things had never been. I can see that putting people off to begin with, but if you picked up the book already knowing it was about Victorian poets and squabbling Victorian scholars then I would think you'd be prepared for that kind of thing and be able to wade through it. which reveal a hitherto unknown, and clearly affectionate, attachment between Ash and a woman not his wife.I cannot but feel, though it may be an illusion induced by the delectable drug of understanding, that you must in some way share my eagerness that further conversation could be mutually profitable that we must meet. Fast paced dialogues sprouting from picturesque secondary characters of the Academia tinted with sporadic brushtrokes of colorful yet haunting humor create the perfect palette for a Gothic scenario where raging storms, spooky cemeteries and ancient legends blend with sumptuous meditation on the concept of possession.