Now is the time to lament the perhaps insignificant fact that there is no feminine word for “masterpiece.” Because A. He is “word-obsessed.” He has become, in the first sense of this novel’s title, “possessed.”

And finds not one, but two drafts of what could almost be a love letter, written by Ash, full of revisions and cross-outs and a terrible “urgency.” Roland palms the letters! From then on, his life becomes electric, crammed with meaning. And by now, still on of this 546-page book, the reader of “Possession” may be wondering: Why Ash ? Isn’t he an all-too-obvious evocation of Robert Browning, with those tiresome dramatic monologues of his, and hasn’t the point already been made that Ash lived a long, respectable, essentially uninteresting life?īut Roland turns a page. So Roland, a failure as a lover and a failure in his field, opens Ash’s copy of Vico. Here Randolph Henry Ash had come, cramming his elastic mind and memory with unconsidered trifles from History and Topography. Still, Roland derives a quiet pleasure just being here in the library, on an ordinary morning: “Here Carlyle had come, here George Eliot had progressed through the bookshelves. After her brief fling with English Lit, she types, now, for a living. Roland’s dispirited girlfriend, Val, hasn’t even passed her exams. But in Thatcher’s England there aren’t any. He should have used his university education to get a job. Roland comes from the urban lower-middle class.

Blackadder (who since 1951 has been editing the complete works of 19th-Century poet Randolph Henry Ash), checks out Ash’s own copy of Vico’s “Principi di una Scienza Nuova.” It looks as if no one has touched this book-well, maybe-since Ash himself last touched it. Roland Michell, a part-time research assistant to Prof. Three-thirty in the morning, London, September, 1986.

As byatt 1990 novel