Possession: A Romance

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The story constantly jumps from between the modern setting to a Victorian love story and is told in the various forms of letters, poems, essays, and straightforward narrative. Roland and Maud receive some information from Leonora Stern, Maud's colleague, that there may be further details on what exactly happened to Ash and LaMotte to be found in France. An interesting and at least as important theme is that on the female condition and feminism, now and then. The librarian handed it to Roland Michell, who was sitting waiting for it in the Reading Room of the London Library. The novel was not suited for me for the reasons stated above and it does not mean that I believe it is a bad book.

Possession is an exhilarating novel of wit and romance, at once a literary detective novel and a triumphant love story.

Winner of England's Booker Prize and the literary sensation of the year, Possession is an exhilarating novel of wit and romance, at once an intellectual mystery and a triumphant love story. An important message in Possession is that there will always be some distance between what historians know and what actually occurred.

Possession is set both in the present day and the Victorian era, contrasting the two time periods, as well as echoing similarities and satirising modern academia and mating rituals. 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. It was shabby but civilised, alive with history but inhabited also by living poets and thinkers who could be found squatting on the slotted metal floors of the stacks, or arguing pleasantly at the turning of the stair. I read the letters twice and Sabine’s diary slowly once, the sort of read that is three times over in reality. They have a chance encounter with the owner of Seal Court, LaMotte's former home, and manage to procure an invitation to visit.The Victorian poems are so droll, so irrelevant to the excitement of the modern day, that it's truly amazing just to see the way intellectuals "make love. The novel was also adapted as a radio play, serialised in 15 parts between 19 December 2011 and 6 January 2012, on BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour. He was excited by the ferocious vitality and darting breadth of reference of the work, and secretly, personally, he was rather pleased that all this had been achieved out of so peaceable, so unruffled a private existence. For me, Possession is like a bottle of wine or a box of really good chocolate (the really, expensive and sinfully good kind). That was when I started to figure out what I was doing because then I tried reading my favorite novel of Arturo Perez-Reverte’s, and similarly, rather than being swept away, all I could see was the melodramatic dialogue and some fucked up coded gender politics that I considered writing an enraged essay about.