How we cite our quotes: Possession: A Romance. London: Vintage Books, 1991.
Quote #4
Those girls in the 1950s and 1960s had thought of her as motherly. Later generations had assumed she was lesbian, even, ideologically, that she was a repressed and unregenerate lesbian. (7.12)
One of the fascinating things about this passage is the way it captures the historical and cultural changes that prompt Beatrice's students to interpret her character—and her sexuality—in vastly different ways.
Quote #5
In fact her thoughts about her own sexuality were dominated entirely by her sense of the massive, unacceptable bulk of her breasts. […] She imagined herself grotesquely swollen, looked modestly down and met no one's eye. (7.12)
Although Possession's narrator doesn't say so explicitly, Beatrice Nest seems to have been celibate all her life—in part because of the discomfort that she feels in her own body, and in part because she's never found the kind of ideal relationship she's always dreamed of having. This celibacy is one of the characteristics that connects her to Ellen Ash.
Quote #6
They undressed and cuddled together for cold comfort. At first Roland thought it was not going to work after all. There are certain things that cannot be done only on will power. […] He lit on an image, a woman in a library, a woman not naked but voluminously clothed, concealed in rustling silk and petticoats, fingers folded over the place where the tight black silk bodice met the springing skirts, a woman whose face was sweet and sad, a stiff bonnet framing loops of thick hair. (7.114)
This passage is a curious one, and it raises some fascinating questions about Roland Mitchell's sexual desires and needs. Why is it that this fantasy of Ellen Ash, "voluminously clothed" in a library, turns him on in a moment when nothing else will?