Possession: A Romance was published by Chatto & Windus in 1990 and won the Booker Prize. Roland Mitchell, an impoverished postdoctoral researcher working on the (fictional) Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash, discovers a draft of an unsent letter in a library book — a letter from Ash to an unknown woman, written in a tone of passionate urgency wholly absent from the austere public record. Roland traces the letter’s intended recipient to Christabel LaMotte, a reclusive female poet of the same era — a figure resembling Christina Rossetti and Emily Dickinson.
Roland approaches Maud Bailey, a feminist literary scholar who specializes in LaMotte, and together they investigate what proves to be a secret, passionate, transformative love affair between the two poets — an affair suppressed by Victorian propriety and by subsequent literary establishments invested in particular interpretations of both writers. Meanwhile, rival academics — American, well-funded, ruthless — pursue the same evidence.
Byatt’s achievement is to create complete literary worlds for both invented poets: Ash’s dramatic monologues (resembling Browning), LaMotte’s fairy-tale verse (resembling Rossetti), their letters (resembling real Victorian correspondence in their elaborate formality and passionate subtext), and even LaMotte’s prose fairy tales. The pastiche is so accomplished that readers report preferring the Victorian sections to the modern narrative.
Collecting Possession
First edition (Chatto & Windus, London, 1990): Cloth with dust jacket. Booker Prize winner.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $200–$600
- Very good: $75–$200
- Signed copies: $300–$800
- US first (Random House, 1990), fine/fine: $40–$100