Guest review by Dennis Hamley: POSSESSION, a Romance, by A S Byatt

"Possession is my favourite-ever novel. I re-read it once every three years and each time I find even more in it."

Dennis Hamley's first novel, Pageants of Despair, was published in 1974. He read English at Jesus College, Cambridge, and has a PhD from Leicester. After teaching, lecturing and acting as County English Advisor for Hertfordshire, he retired to write full-time. He has written widely for children and young adults; one of his best-known books, The War and Freddy, was shortlisted for the Smarties Prize. His recent adult novel, The Second Person from Porlock, is a fantasy riff on the chaotic life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and was published in 2021. His highly-acclaimed novel Spirit of the Place will be reissued by Writers Review Publishing later this year. He lives in Oxford with his wife Kay, an artist.

I personally owe a lot to this wonderful novel. It inspired my own Spirit of the Place, of which a reviewer said, ‘It reads like a starter pack for Possession.’ Was this a put-down or praise? I chose praise, because, though not intentionally, that’s what, in effect, it is. I remember back in 1990, when the opinions of the Booker panel were televised before the winner was announced, someone from the Cambridge English Faculty dismissed Possession because, he opined, any of his colleagues could have written the poetry Byatt writes on behalf of the novel’s two fictional poets. I remember thinking, ‘No you couldn’t, mate.’ Because this book is extraordinary, unique, a mighty tour de force.

Roland Michell is a humble research student writing a paper on the Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash. He is subservient to the demanding Professor Blackadder of Prince Albert College, London and frightened by Professor Mortimer Cropper, an American who covets memorabilia for his definitive Randolph Ash Institute at his American university and will stop at nothing to get hold of it. He is the nearest in the novel to an evil character and brings an element of Dark Academe to the story, which also involves the razor-sharp Professor Leonora Stern, also from America, and Beatrice Nest, whose interest is mainly in Christabel La Motte’s friend Blanche Glover.

Roland makes an intriguing discovery in the London Library. In the mid-nineteenth century Crabb Robinson held breakfasts to which the great and the good in literature were invited. Roland discovers a letter from Randolph Ash, a poet who stands as a splendid avatar for Robert Browning and Tennyson, to a ‘Dear Madam,’ who he had obviously just met at one of Crabb’s breakfasts. Who is this mysterious recipient?

A fascinating correspondence develops between them. The ‘Dear Madam’ is also a poet, Christabel LaMotte, whose verse has elements of Christina Rossetti as well as Sara Coleridge in her domestic verse, Emily Dickinson with her frequent use of breathless dashes and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, whose actual elopement parallels the fictional version still to come.

The novel concerns three love affairs. One, in the nineteenth century; is between Ash and Christabel. The present-day understated, slow burning romance is between Roland and Maud Bailey, a descendant of LaMotte and head of the Women’s Studies department at the University of Lincoln. Oddly, there was no university at Lincoln when Possession was published, but there is now. A clear example of fiction turning into reality. The third is the relationship, hinted to be lesbian, between Christabel and Blanche Glover in their cottage by the Thames. Christabel writes her poems, Blanche paints her pictures. Ash walks in, Christabel leaves and Blanche drowns herself. Shades of Virginia Woolf.

For me, Byatt’s poetry is the greatest of the many triumphs of this novel. Far from being mere pastiche, it illuminates the already three-dimensional characters.

First a sample of Ash in his poem Ask to Embla, part of a narrative, but also a declaration of love.

They say that women change: ‘tis so: but you
Are ever constant in your changefulness,
Like that still thread of falling river, one
From source to last embrace in the still pool
Ever renewed and ever moving on
From first not last a myriad water-drops
And you – I love you for it – are the force
That moves and holds the form.

There is irony here, because Christabel and Ash are travelling through Yorkshire as man and wife. However, Ash is sending letters home to Ellen, his real wife, telling her all about it, including their visit to Whitby, as if he is alone. An attitude which reflects Robert Browning’s misogyny:

Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart.
‘Tis woman’s whole existence.

Kathleen Jones called her biography of Christina Rossetti Learning Not to be First and that sums it up perfectly. For LaMotte, Christina Rossetti, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sara Coleridge and Emily Dickinson, poetry was a private, even domestic, art, as were Blanche Glover’s paintings. In a letter to Ash, Christabel writes, I have it in my mind to write an epic – or if not an epic… a great mythical poem – and how can a poor breathless woman with no staying power confess such an ambition to the author of the Ragnarok?

Ironically, she does just that, about Melusine, the snake goddess, a powerful narrative and a fierce competitor for Ash's Swammerdam and Mummy Possest, both of which appear in the book and are akin to Browning's dramatic monologues.

But Christabel has other preoccupations. Her short-lived affair with Ash is over, by mutual agreement, though their love stays on. This poem of longing may be meant as a consequence.

I press my palms on
Window’s white cross
Is that your dark form
Beyond the glass?

How do they come who haunt us
In gown or plumey hat
Or white marbling nakedness
Frozen --- is it –- That?

Their remembrances haunt us
A trick of a wrist
Loved then -– automatic –-
Caught at and kist

The emotion is obvious. Christabel is laying herself bare. But she is only a character in a book . The underlying voice is Byatt’s. The comparison is with Emily Dickinson, dashes and all.

Christabel, half Breton, is with her cousin in Brittany. She brings with her a consequence, unexpected but inevitable, of her affair with Ash. She is pregnant with a daughter, who will carry the family on to generations close to our own. And now the story reaches its climax, tense, fast-moving, sometimes very funny, sometimes shocking. It culminates with Cropper, Roland, Maud, Leonora and all the others involved in the struggle gathered together at night in a shrieking storm and opening up Ash’s grave – for what? Suffice it to say that the solution involves possession of a copyright and there can be only one winner. An echo of the real-life event when Dante Gabriel Rossetti opened the grave of Lizzie Siddall to recover his poems which, in a thoughtless fit of emotion, he had buried with her.

So the story is over. Roland Michell and Maud Bailey can now realise and consummate their love and Roland can take up the proper job he has been offered, albeit at a university in Amsterdam.

There is a short, bitter-sweet, ironic epilogue. Ash meets a little girl and they start talking. There is a consequence.. Ash comes off worse from it.. No more, one might say, than he deserves.

Possession is my favourite-ever novel. I re-read it once every three years and each time I find even more in it.

PS A film of Possession starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Jeremy Northam was made in 2002. To my surprise I found it on Youtube and we watched it last night, Half-expecting a travesty I was pleasantly surprised. There were no poems and the part of Roland Michell was played by an American whose name escapes me but is pretty good. Every scene meshed in with my private internal film as I read the book. It's an excellent adaptation. The bitter-sweet epilogue is beautifully handled. I was well satisfied at the end and I recommend it as a quick way to to experience the book and prepare you for the infinitely more absorbing real thing.

Possession is published by Vintage Classics.

It's been published in many other editions and with many different covers - here's a selection.