Possession

Possession: A Romance is a 1990 novel by the English writer A.S. Byatt that won the Booker Prize. It follows two modern scholars uncovering a hidden love affair between two Victorian poets. For the HSC, it is studied in English Extension 1 for the elective Historical worlds.

A.S. Byatt published Possession: A Romance in 1990 and won the Booker Prize for it that year. Its subtitle matters: a "romance" in the older sense is a quest narrative, a form that licenses coincidence, buried treasure and destined love, and Byatt uses that antique genre knowingly to tell a story about scholars trained to distrust exactly those things.

The plot braids two historical worlds. In the 1980s present, a junior researcher, Roland Michell, discovers two draft letters tucked inside a book once owned by the great Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash. The letters suggest a secret attachment to another poet, Christabel LaMotte, a connection no biography has ever recorded. Roland and the LaMotte scholar Maud Bailey follow the paper trail - letters, diaries, poems, a locked archive - and reconstruct a hidden nineteenth-century love affair, even as their own guarded modern relationship begins to mirror it. Through the documents, Byatt builds the Victorian story from the inside: Ash and LaMotte spend a stolen fortnight together in Yorkshire, after which LaMotte flees to Brittany, secretly bears Ash's child and never tells him.

The two worlds converge at Ash's grave, where the acquisitive collector Mortimer Cropper attempts to exhume a box he believes holds the affair's secret, and Maud is revealed to be the lovers' own descendant. But Byatt withholds the deepest truth from every character: the Postscript returns to 1868 and stages a single lost afternoon that leaves "no discernible trace". The reader alone is admitted to the historical world the scholars will always miss.

The novel's governing idea is that a historical world is assembled, painstakingly and imperfectly, from surviving fragments, and never simply retrieved whole. Its very first sentence begins with an object, not a person - "The book was thick and black and covered with dust." - the dust standing for the accumulated distance between now and then. The reconstruction is framed as a mystery, since "Literary critics make natural detectives.", but the aphorism carries a quiet warning: a detective wants to possess a solution, and the archive will finally demand humility instead.

Byatt's most audacious technique is pastiche: she writes the Victorian world herself, inventing hundreds of lines of Ash and LaMotte's poetry, letters and journals in convincing period voices. Christabel's letters carry a wholly persuasive forged passion - "I cannot let you burn me up, nor can I resist you. No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed." - while elsewhere she sets her prized solitude against its cost. The forged authenticity is the point: all recovered pasts are, in part, made.

The title fans out into an ethical drama about who owns the dead. Ash, the poet at its centre, is himself possessed after death, collected, edited and finally exhumed. The cost falls on the living too: Blackadder, who has spent his life editing Ash, has all but erased himself inside another man's archive.

Finally, Byatt insists that the present reads the past through its own moment. Roland and Maud are "children of a time and culture which mistrusted love", and the novel presses the reconstructive problem: imagining what it felt like to be the Victorians demands a real effort. As the quest closes around them, Roland senses they are "driven by a plot or fate ... not their plot or fate but that of those others" - the reconstructed romance shaping the reconstructing one.

• Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
• Sand Talk
• The Arab Shakespeare Trilogy
• 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare
• Marie Antoinette
• The Hare with Amber Eyes
• All HSC English resources