Possession Characters

When you're a "meek" (8.70), kind of small, twenty-nine-year-old dude and your long-term girlfriend has nicknamed you "Mole" (2.5), you might not be used to thinking of yourself as the hero of a mo...

When a smarmy ex-boyfriend describes you as the kind of woman who "thicks men's blood with cold" (3.59), you know you're doing something right.Unlike the nightmare of "Life-in-Death" that appears i...

Handsome, charming, and more than a little susceptible to smart women who like good poetry, Randolph Henry Ash is, in his own way, just as enigmatic as Christabel LaMotte. As with Christabel, there...

Who was Christabel LaMotte, deep down? What do we really know about her?Even though Possession's twentieth-century characters have learned a lot of new things about Christabel LaMotte by the time t...

If you're a Harry Potter fan, the symbolic significance of Mortimer Cropper's name should be pretty clear. Just as Lord Voldemort's name suggests that the clammy, no-nosed wizard has stolen somethi...

Brash, bold, and talkative, Leonora Stern sweeps into Possession like a mythical mother goddess. As the novel's narrator tells us, she's "a majestically large woman, in all directions," and her "ex...

James Blackadder was Roland Mitchell's thesis supervisor, and now he's Roland's employer. Scottish, "stringent" (2.3), and just a teensy bit curmudgeonly, Professor Blackadder is the kind of schola...

It's hard not to sympathize with Beatrice Nest, the twentieth-century Ellen Ash scholar who roosts in a corner of the "Ash Factory" and slowly works away at a study of Ellen Ash's journals. Life ha...

Who was Ellen Ash, deep down?In some ways, Randolph Henry Ash's wife is just as mysterious to us as his lover, Christabel LaMotte. Possession's twentieth-century scholars have decades' worth of her...

Glover or leave her, Blanche is another of Possession's enigmatic characters. The novel's twentieth-century scholars assume that she was Christabel LaMotte's long-term partner, but the novel itself...

Roland's girlfriend Val is the only one of Possession's important characters who isn't given a surname. That probably has something to do with the fact that Val is such a fixture in Roland Mitchell...

You've gotta hand it to Euan MacIntyre: he may be one of Possession's very minor characters, but his charm, insight, and daring really steal the show in the last few chapters of the novel. And that...

One of the funniest things about Possession is that A. S. Byatt isn't afraid to use totally un-subtle surnames to tell us a little something about a character's significance to the story.Take Fergu...

Sir George and Lady Joan Bailey are distant relations of Maud Bailey and even more distant relations of Christabel LaMotte. Sir George is a direct descendant of the Sir George Bailey who married Ch...

In Possession's early chapters, we're led to believe that Maia Thomasine Bailey was Christabel LaMotte's niece. That's what Maud Bailey thinks, too, and she ought to know: after all, Maia Thomasine...

Sabine de Kercoz was one of Christabel LaMotte's distant cousins. The two women were related through their maternal grandmother (18.44), and whereas Christabel's family had migrated to England, Sab...

Sophie Bailey (née Sophia LaMotte) was Christabel LaMotte's sister, and Sir George Bailey, Sr. is the man she married. As you may have guessed already, Possession's own shotgun-wielding Sir George...

F. R. Leavis was a real-world scholar and literary critic, but A. S. Byatt inserts a fictionalized version of him into Possession to give extra depth and texture to the novel's descriptions of Jame...

Ariane Le Minier enters Possession in Chapter 18, by way of a letter that she has sent to Leonora Stern. An ambitious and insightful scholar of French and Breton literatures at the University of Na...

If you can't think of Isidore LaMotte without picturing the finger-chopping Isildur from J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, you're not alone.There's no denying that Christabel LaMotte's father...

Priscilla Penn Cropper was Mortimer Cropper's great-grandmother. She was a contemporary of Christabel LaMotte and Randolph Henry Ash, and, as Possession's narrator eventually reveals, she correspon...

Along with Priscilla Penn Cropper and Christabel LaMotte, Hella Lees is one of the nineteenth-century spiritualists who lend a touch of the supernatural to Possession.We readers never meet Mrs. Lee...

Gode is another one of Possession's characters that comes to us from a distance. We only ever "meet" her through the journals of Sabine de Kercoz, and we never see her speak or act first-hand.Gode...

We meet Veronica Honiton just briefly in Possession. She isn't a full-fledged character, really—she's one of the many peripheral figures whose voice appears in letters, essays, and other document...

We know what you're thinking, Shmoopers: any relation to Chandler Bing?Sadly, no. But that's all right: Possession's Toby Byng has a few other things going for him instead.Our Mr. Byng is Sir Georg...

Bertha (whose surname we never learn) is one of the many minor characters that we only ever meet third-hand. She was a servant in Randolph Henry Ash's household, and her role in Possession is a lit...

Ellen Ash's Sister Patience and Her ClanEllen Ash's journals introduce us briefly to her sister Patience, along with a clan of nieces and nephews who descend on the Ash household for a visit in the...