Possession

A.S. Byatt has earned a unique reputation as a novelist who manages to combine passion and intellect, and the life of the emotions with that of the mind; and these qualities are shown at their triumphant best in Possession, a tour de force of wit and intelligence, romance and scholarship. Like The French Lieutenant's Woman, it is formally both a modern novel and a high Victorian novel. Two young academics are researching into the lives of — respectively — the Browningesque mid-Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash and his contemporary, Christabel LaMotte; and as they delve deeper into the turbulent and hitherto unrelated lives of the two poets through their letters, journals and poems, and trace their movements from London to the north Yorkshire coast, from spiritualist seances to the fairy-haunted far west of Brittany, a bizarre and haunting counterpointing and correspondence of passions and ideas begins to emerge. An astonishingly rich and exhilarating blend of mystery, romance, comedy, Victoriana and modern university novel — it reaches its climax on a storm-tossed night in the churchyard where Ash and his secret are buried — Possession is A.S. Byatt's finest and most ambitious novel yet.