Possession
by A.S. Byatt
Like John Fowles's _The French Lieutenant's Woman_, _Possession_ is both
a modern novel and a high Victorian novel. Two young academics are
researching into the lives of, respectively, the Browningesque
mid-Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash and his contemporary Christabel
LaMotte; as they delve deeper into the turbulent and hitherto unrelated
lives of the two poets through their letters, journals and poems, and
trace their movements from London to the north Yorkshire coast -- from
spiritualist seances to the fairy-haunted far west of Brittany -- a
bizarre and haunting counterpointing and correspondence of passions
and ideas begins to emerge. An astonishingly rich and exhilarating
blen of mystery, romance, comedy, Victoriana and modern university
novel -- it reaches its climax on a storm-tossed night in the
churchyard where Ash and his secret are buried -- _Possession_ is A.S.
Byatt's finest and most ambitious novel yet.
Beauty and the Beast
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