How we cite our quotes: Possession: A Romance. London: Vintage Books, 1991.
Quote #1
At 11.00 he found what he thought was the relevant passage in Vico. Vico had looked for historical fact in the poetic metaphors of myth and legend; this piecing together was his 'new science'. His Proserpine was the corn, the origin of commerce and community. Randolph Henry Ash's Proserpine had been seen as a Victorian reflection of religious doubt, a meditation on the myths of Resurrection. (1.6)
As Possession will make clear, the Victorian religious doubt that the novel's twentieth-century scholars see in Randolph Henry Ash's work was caused, in part, by advances in scientific knowledge about the natural world. Like many of his contemporaries, R. H. Ash finds it hard to preserve his faith as he explores new discoveries in biology and geology.
Quote #2
He had once seen a naturalist on the television who seemed to him to be an analogue of himself. This man went out with a pouch and gathered up owl pellets, which he labeled, and later, took apart with forceps, bathed in glass beakers of various cleansing fluids, ordering and rearranging the orts and fragments of the owl's compressed package of bone, tooth and fur, in order to reconstitute the dead shrew or slow-worm which had run, died, and made its way through owl-gut. (3.19)
James Blackadder's interest in the natural world extends only so far as he can use it as a source of metaphors for his own life—and specifically for his scholarly work on the poetry and plays of Randolph Henry Ash.
Quote #3
The wolds of Lincolnshire are a small surprise. Tennyson grew up in one of their tight twisting valleys. From them he made the cornfields of immortal Camelot.
On either side the river lie
Long fields of barley and of rye
That clothe the wold and meet the sky.
Roland saw immediately that the word 'meet' was precise and surprising, not vague. They drove over the plain, up the rolling road, out of the valley. (5.1-3)
More than once throughout Possession, the characters experience small epiphanies about literature when they visit the landscapes that inspired the writing. It turns out the reading and studying literature isn't just something you do in an ivory tower or academic office—it's really part of your everyday life, too.