Possession by A.S. Byatt

Published 1990 · 190,406 words · about 16 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Mystery & Crime, Romance

How hard is Possession to read?

Possession scores 60 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 62 out of 100
Byatt writes in multiple registers—Victorian pastiche for the poets' letters and poems, contemporary academic prose for the scholars. The vocabulary is demanding, requiring readers to inhabit both eras.
Sentence structure: 60 out of 100
Sentences vary by register, from elaborate Victorian periods to the clipped prose of academic competition. Byatt shifts between styles with virtuosic control, demanding attention to tone.
Abstraction: 62 out of 100
The novel explores love, scholarship, the relationship between past and present, and the nature of literary interpretation. These abstractions are embodied in both the Victorian romance and the modern detective story.
Information density: 62 out of 100
The novel is densely packed—Victorian poems and letters, modern academic politics, multiple storylines—all requiring readers to track parallel narratives and their echoes.
Narrative indirection: 62 out of 100
The Victorian love affair emerges through documents discovered by the modern scholars. Readers piece together the past from fragments while watching the present-day romance develop in parallel.
Symbolic density: 62 out of 100
The parallel structure itself is symbolic—past and present mirror and illuminate each other. The discovered letters symbolize how the past possesses the present, how love transcends death.
Ironic distance: 55 out of 100
Byatt maintains affectionate irony about the modern academics while writing the Victorian pastiche with genuine passion. The novel celebrates scholarly love while seeing its absurdities.
Resolution withholding: 55 out of 100
The novel provides romantic resolution in both timelines while leaving the larger questions about interpretation and possession philosophically open. The postscript adds a final twist.
Structural complexity: 65 out of 100
Dual timelines, multiple narrative modes (letters, poems, journals, third-person narration), and parallel plots create a complex structure. The braiding of past and present demands active reading.

How Possession is regarded

Possession holds a literary regard score of 72 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Prizes

Where Possession sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (365 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, Possession scores 58 out of 100. A second mythos, comedy, pulls at it with a weight of 0.3. About the map of stories.

Mode: Low Mimetic
He thought of himself as though he were an application form, for a job, a degree, a life
Symbol: Mythical (archetypal)
These things are there. The garden and the tree
Mythos: Romance iii (The Quest) (romance iii)
In any case, since Blackadder and Leonora and Cropper had come, it had changed from Quest, a good romantic form, into Chase and Race, two other equally valid ones.
Genre: Romance + Anatomy + Novel
The point of view in which this tale comes under the Romantic definition lies in the attempt to connect a bygone time with the very present that is flitting away from us.

Where the story of Possession takes place

  • London, Lincolnshire, Yorkshire, Brittany and the Surrey Downs, September 1986 to autumn 1987 (1986 to 1987), the main setting
  • Richmond, Yorkshire coast and Brittany: the Ash-LaMotte affair, 1858-1860 (1858 to 1860)
  • Victorian England, 1859-1861 (1859 to 1861)
  • A Lincolnshire meadow, May 1868 (Postscript)
  • Ash's death and funeral at Hodershall, November 1889

5 things that are true of Possession, with the passage for each

  1. The novel opens on a day in September 1986, when Roland is handed a dusty book at the London Library.

    It was ten in the morning, one day in September 1986.

  2. Christabel LaMotte's tombstone gives her birth as 3 January 1825 and burial as 8 May 1890.

    Born January 3rd 1825 Laid to rest May 8th 1890

  3. Blanche Glover drowned in the Thames in June 1860 with stones sewn into her pockets.

    Several large round stones were carefully sewn into the pockets of the unfortunate creature’s clothing, which was genteel but not opulent.

  4. Cropper and Hildebrand Ash count thirteen turfs lifted and stacked at the Ash grave before the digging.

    Someone had already been digging; green turfs were neatly stacked against the rails. Hildebrand counted thirteen.

  5. Christabel's unread letter to Ash reveals that they had a daughter, who was raised as her sister's child.

    You have a daughter, who is well, and married, and the mother of a beautiful boy.

Scenes in Possession that Frye would name

60 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Anagnorisis, untitled
She said, “I have seen this before. We have one. She was my great-great-great-grandmother.” Maud recognises Maia's photograph and thus her own descent from both poets.
Anagnorisis, untitled
Maud said, “It’s both sides. It’s everything. It was always there.…” The discovery of the letters in the dolls' bed pivots the first half of the quest.
Cognitio, untitled
You have a daughter, who is well, and married, and the mother of a beautiful boy. The reading of Christabel's letter restores the lost identity, the child and the line of descent.
Hamartia, untitled
he slipped the letters between the leaves of his own copy of the Oxford Selected Ash, which he was never without. Roland's theft of the letters is the original fault that drives the plot.
Point of epiphany, untitled
Maud said, “She saw this. I’m sure she saw this. Look at the beginning of Melusina.” The Thomasine Foss cave of light is where poem and landscape touch, and so does Ash's world and the modern one.
Pathos, untitled
another unfortunate young woman plunged to a terrible death in the swollen waters of the Thames. The press account of Blanche Glover's drowning is the book's sacrificial death scene.

Books that share these scenes with Possession

About the author

A.S. Byatt