How we cite our quotes: Possession: A Romance. London: Vintage Books, 1991.
Quote #4
They sat down at a low table in the corner, under a poster for the Campus Crèche and facing posters for the Pregnancy Advisory Service—'A woman has a right to decide about her own body. We put women first'—and a Feminist Revue: Come and see the Sorcieres, the Vamps, the daughters of Kali and the Fatae Morganae. We'll make your blood run cold and make you laugh on the Sinister side of your face at Women's Wit and Wickedness. (4.85)
Possession is set during the heady years of second-wave feminism, and this passage—which is set in the Women's Studies Centre at Lincoln University—really helps to bring the period to life.
Quote #5
A beautiful woman, Simone Weil said, seeing herself in the mirror, knows, 'This is I.' An ugly woman knows, with equal certainty, 'This is not I.' Maud knew this neat division represented an over-simplification. The doll-mask she saw had nothing to do with her, nothing. (4.164)
For Maud, her overt physical beauty is a source of discomfort, and it also misrepresents her inner self as she sees it. Thanks to it, she feels she needs to guard against being seen, and treated as, an object to be possessed.
Quote #6
The feminists had divined that, who once, when she rose to speak at a meeting, had hissed and cat-called, assuming her crowning glory to be the seductive and marketable product of an inhumanely tested bottle. (4.164)
Here, Possession offers a not-so-subtle critique of prejudice within second-wave feminism. Although the novel on the whole is sympathetic to the movement, or at least to feminism in general if not to second-wave feminism specifically, its narrator doesn't hesitate to criticize where criticism is due.