Possession: A Romance

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He thought he knew Ash fairly well, as well as anyone might know a man whose life seemed to be all in his mind, who lived a quiet and exemplary married life for forty years, whose correspondence was voluminous indeed, but guarded, courteous and not of the most lively. Roland saw her black silk skirts, her velvet trains, sweeping compressed between the Fathers of the Church, and heard her firm foot ring on metal among the German poets. He was my go-to until I read his latest novel and the spell was broken- I stayed in the present and analytical- that it wouldn't work again. 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. okay first of all I was wondering what could be interesting in school students studying the life of poets?

Christabel LaMotte, likewise, is something entirely new; her poems have a dash of Emily-Dickinsonian diction but with French-English, devout Christian, determinedly feminist sensibilities. I read somewhere that if you pick up a book, and you're not enjoying it by either: a) your age (if you are under 50); or b) 100 minus your age (if you are over 50), you should abandon it and move on. and Miscellaneous--Dancing, Deaf and Dumb, Death, Dentistry, Devil and Demonology, Distribution, Dogs, Domestic Servants, Dreams.I’ve seen reviews where readers have skipped the poetry which is sad because it’s both an important carrier of the novel’s ideas and themes as well as making interventions in the narrative. But more of it is about being so far away from what I like to think of as myself that there are days where I can’t get back.

It would be possible, Roland thought, to identify the breakfast party, which must have been one of Crabb Robinson's later efforts to provide stimulating conversation for the students of the new London University. I say “at home” what extraordinary folly- when you take pleasure in making me feel most unhemlich , as the Germans have it, least of all at home, but always on edge… But poets don’t want homes- do they?

What I would gain is not worth what I would lose-I am lucky enough to have enough time with my other self banked right now to be able to say that with certainty. Something here might be made of your Fairy's legendary rootedness in veritable castles and genuine agricultural reform--one of the queerest aspects of her story, to a modern mind.

This is a very fine work of literature indeed interspersed with writings from the Victorian poets the academics are supposedly pursuing and letters as well. The novel invites the reader to understand how the life of an artist is an essential part and key to understanding their works.The novel concerns the relationship between two fictional Victorian poets, Randolph Henry Ash (whose life and work are loosely based on those of the English poet Robert Browning, or Alfred, Lord Tennyson, whose work is more consonant with the themes expressed by Ash, as well as Tennyson's having been poet-laureate to Queen Victoria) and Christabel LaMotte (based on Christina Rossetti), [3] as uncovered by present-day academics Roland Michell and Maud Bailey. Ash liked his characters at or over the edge of madness, constructing systems of belief and survival from the fragments of experience available to them.

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. Winner of England's Booker Prize and a literary sensation, Possession traces the lives of a pair of young academics as they uncover a clandestine relationship between two long-dead Victorian poets. I can find no flaw in Byatt's telling and I think it is kind of laziness not to want to put in any hard work yourself for the pleasure of such a tale. 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.Perhaps you hold your hands over your ears when the Rolling Stones switch to 12/8 time, or fast-forward through all the Frank Sivero scenes in Goodfellas? How much I owe to his continuing good health, that he should feel able and eager, at eighty-two years of age, to entertain poets and undergraduates and mathematical professors and political thinkers so early in the day, and to tell the anecdote of the Bust with his habitual fervour without too much delaying the advent of buttered toast. For the next half hour Roland worked haphazardly, moving backwards and forwards in the Vico, half-looking for Proserpina, half-reading Ash's notes, which was not easy, since they were written in various languages, in Ash's annotating hand, which was reduced to a minute near-printing, not immediately identifiable as the same as his more generous poetic or letter-writing hand.