Where It All Goes Down
Victorian England and England in 1986–1987
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—the geographical and cultural territory known as Brittany—where the nineteenth-century Christabel LaMotte seeks refuge with her Breton family, and where Possession's twentieth-century scholars attempt to discover what happened in the months that followed Christabel's love affair with Randolph Henry Ash.
Brittany, by the way, happens to be a place steeped in folklore—Arthurian stories, among other things—and some people in the nineteenth century thought it was kind of magical place in general. It's fitting that our characters would stop here on their romantic quest for the truth about their favorite poets.
The novel's nineteenth-century characters live in the time of Queen Victoria, and its twentieth-century characters live in Margaret Thatcher's Britain. Their respective Englands are very different, but, as the novel suggests, the nation's history and cultural heritage continue to live on in the present day.