Possession: A Romance

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Following a trail of clues from letters and journals, they collaborate to uncover the truth about Ash and LaMotte's relationship, before it is discovered by rival colleagues. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.

Or semi-historical-literary novel When I first read it 30 years ago, i was so entranced that I even wondered whether Lamotte was 'real' or not, although I pretty quickly guessed that Ash couldn't be despite the Tennyson-Browning versimilitude. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. He was not sure that Miss Rossetti would have approved of Ash's theology, or of his sexual psychology. Regarding the epigraphs, I recommend that the reader carefully study each epigraph before reading the chapter; and then upon finishing the chapter, go back and read it again and see if you correctly figured out the true meaning of it. They feel the need to keep their discoveries private as many other academics are chasing similar leads.

And there was a pleasure to be had from reading the sentences Ash had read, touched with his fingers, scanned with his eyes. A remarkable feat of storytelling through prose and poetry that compares with nothing I have ever read before.

I think she says something like this: Michell realized his love for poetry superseded his commitment to ideas of poetry expounded by the different schools of literary criticism. And it isn't just "narrative greed" that makes it such a compelling page-turner, it's the fact that Roland and company's stories, troubles and triumphs are genuinely moving. In addition to the new-old poetry, Possession has packed inside it a meditation on the arts of scholarship and biography; the most moving writing about celibacy I've ever come across; a critical work on the erotics of reading; and a half-lament, half-ode to the powers of time and memory and forgetting. By the time I was done, my brain circuitry had slid back into it’s proper place, and I could answer the sort of basic questions that I couldn’t before I had started. Creating this story about fictional Victorian poets, including their writings, letters, diaries, etc.It's the warmth and spirit that Byatt has breathed into her characters rather than their cerebral pursuits that makes us care". Cause dude, there was a movie coming out with some of my favorite sexy people in it (Jeremy Northam and Jennifer Ehele), and duuuude it was about hot Victorians having hot sexy smart people sexy sex and their words were as hot as their hot costumes and hot modern academics (ooohmygood whoos this Aaron Eckhart, hellooo! The happiness project got put on the back burner until I was ready to emerge from the Victorian melancholia, which placed demands on my time too great to allow for preparing meals. Her novels include the Booker Prize winner Possession, The Biographer’s Tale and the quartet, The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower and A Whistling Woman, and her highly acclaimed collections of short stories include Sugar and Other Stories, The Matisse Stories, The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye, Elementals and her most recent book Little Black Book of Stories. The librarian tiptoed away to telephone: whilst he was gone, the dead leaves continued a kind of rustling and shifting, enlivened by their release.

He would have to show all this new treasure trove to Blackadder, who would be both elated and grumpy, who would anyway be pleased that it was locked away in Safe 5 and not spirited away to Robert Dale Owen University in Harmony City, with so much else. 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? I enjoyed reading this book very much - not only did it encapsulate the area very well (in the sections when it was in Whitby) but it also recorded an interesting and engaging story in an enchanting way.I assume her own writing style was trying to mimic the poets' own writing styles, but I thought it was too wordy. I'm going to have to go even further down the disgustingly adoring path and say that this is going to be a personal classic, for me. 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.

An interesting and at least as important theme is that on the female condition and feminism, now and then. A successful scholar specialized in the underrated poetess Christabel LeMotte flushes with emotion as she anxiously leafs through yellowish pages, wrapped by the familiar odor of mildew, wax and ash. This letter also reveals that Maud is a direct descendent of LaMotte and will now definitively be the owner of all Ash-LaMotte correspondence.S. Byatt's short-story collections, so I knew she had a fine control of language, but Possession is on a different plane, telling the story with a multitude of voices through letters, poems, criticism, biography, and journal entries as well as the prose of the main narrative. 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. But I did find it slow at times and she tends to digress a lot into descriptions that add very little to the story. These detail that LaMotte fell pregnant due to her relationship with Ash but did not want to tell him.