Possession by A.S. Byatt.

Originally Recommended in Highly Illogical Volume 1, Issue 11

For Valentine’s Day, I’m going to recommend a book I already half-recommended a while ago. It’s a book about love and obsession and desire, not just between lovers, but also between an artist and their art or an academic and their research subject. It’s one of my absolute favorite novels, and I come back to it often. Today I’m going to gush some more about Possession by A.S. Byatt.

Roland Michell, while looking through the journal entries and letters of Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash in the London Library, finds drafts of a letter that lead him to suspect that the married Ash had a lover. Further investigation gives him reason to believe that the lover might be Christabel LaMotte, a contemporary poet of considerably less fame than Ash. He goes to Dr. Maud Bailey, a LaMotte scholar, for help. She is skeptical of Roland’s findings, but soon becomes heavily involved in the investigation herself.

The story switches between the modern day scholars and the Victorian poets, and includes letters, poems, and journal entries, all masterfully written by A.S. Byatt. Every time I read it, I often forget that Ash and LaMotte were not real people, and that their work was written for the sake of the novel. Possession is a novel that mixes academic detachment with high romance, and romantic detachment with academic obsession. As the title suggests, it challenges the possessive qualities of love and academic subject - Do the people you love really belong to you? What if they change? If you’ve spent your entire career affirming a narrative of an artist’s life, does their story become yours? What if it changes?

Possession is a book to get lost in, a challenging and gorgeous read, and definitely a journey worth embarking on.

Just, please don’t watch the movie. That way leads to madness and lingering, sexless gazes between Aaron Eckhart and Gwyneth Paltrow.