Possession Analysis

Possession is set in both nineteenth- and twentieth-century England, in a geographical radius that stretches from London to North Yorkshire. The novel also makes an excursion to northwestern France...

Throughout Possession, the narrative voice shifts as the situation demands. The narrator often focuses on telling us things about one character at a time, and the narrator will often use free-indir...

If a novel is called Something-or-Other: a Romance, you can feel pretty confident that it's a romance of some kind. But of what kind?Towards the end of Possession: a Romance, Roland Mitchell has an...

Oscar Wilde knew the importance of being earnest, and A. S. Byatt knows it, too. Like Wilde, she also knows the power of a witty and satirical voice, and Possession brings these two tones together...

In one of his letters to Christabel LaMotte, Randolph Henry Ash explains his view of the difference between poets and novelists. He writes: "What makes me a Poet, and not a novelist—is to do...

Throughout Possession, A. S. Byatt riffs so hard on that title word it's like she's writing a Jason Mraz song instead of a Booker-Prize-winning novel. The word "possession" refers to So Many Things...

"When a writer calls his work a Romance, it need hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to...

Possession ends with a Postscript that shows us one final scene from the life of Randolph Henry Ash. In it, we learn something that the novel's twentieth-century scholars will never know—that is,...

As a not-so-slim hybrid of multiple genres and forms, Possession is going to force your brain to fire on all cylinders.The novelincludes elements of detective fiction and mystery stories, medieval...

Possession's exposition really gets the action started quickly. While doing some research in the London Library, Roland Mitchell stumbles upon potentially life-changing documents: two drafts of a l...

Roland Mitchell is Possession's modern chivalric knight, and he finds himself called to his "quest" by an unexpected source. While doing some mid-morning research in the London Library, Roland disc...

Possession's first act begins with Roland Mitchell's discovery of Randolph Henry Ash's letter to an unnamed woman, and it takes us all the way up to the fateful afternoon when Roland and Maud Baile...

A. S. Byatt has said that Possession was inspired by the word "possession" itself. So, next time you're struck by the awesomeness of any particular word, just think: there may be a novel in there s...

Byatt may be a fan of highly euphemistic language—you know, language that uses figurative terms or images in place of others that may be too sexy—but not even her euphemisms can lower the tempe...

Thomas Carlyle (1.2)George Eliot (1.2)Giambattista Vico, Principj di Scienza Nuova (1.2)Edward Gibbon (1.6)The Venerable Bede (1.6)Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (1.9)John Bunyan (1.19)Chris...