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Possession: A Romance

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Byatt's novel The Biographer's Tale, published in 2000, she originally intended as a short story titled "The Biography of a Biographer", based on her notion of a biographer's life in a library investigating another person's life. [2] This she developed into writing about a character called Phineas G. Nanson, who is attempting to learn about a biographer for a book he intends to write, but who can only locate fragments of his three unwritten biographies, which are on Galton, Ibsen and Linnaeus. [2] Phineas Gilbert Nanson is named after an insect and is almost an anagram of Galton, Ibsen and Linnaeus, though Byatt said this was an "uncanny" coincidence that she did not realise until afterwards. [2] a b Drabble, Margaret (20 April 2010). "Art Thou Contented, Jew? The British novelist on England, the Jews, and anti-Semitism today". Tablet. Cropper also arrives in France, and Roland and Maud narrowly avoid him. They return to France where they are approached by Val and her new boyfriend, Euan. A solicitor, Euan has come across something relevant to the research in a box of old deeds. Christabel left all her papers and effects to the Baileys upon her death, meaning they rightfully belong to Maud and cannot be sold to Cropper.

Summit Highlights Photo". Academy member and award-winning British theater and costume designer John Napier presents the Golden Plate Award to English novelist and essayist Dame Antonia Susan Byatt at the 2017 Summit in Mayfair, London. Sheffield High School; The Mount School, York; Newnham College, Cambridge (BA Hons; Hon. Fellow 1999); Bryn Mawr College, Philadelphia, USA; Somerville College, Oxford. Byatt married Ian Charles Rayner Byatt in 1959 and moved to Durham. [2] They had a daughter together, [14] as well as a son, Charles, who was killed by a drunk-driver at the age of 11 while walking home from school. [2] [7] [10] She spoke of her son's death and its influence on her lecturing and subsequent career after publishing The Children's Book, in which the image of a dead child features: Byatt said she wished to become a full-time writer, but "if I had a job we could send my son to a fee-paying school. My son got killed on Frank Kermode's doorstep, the day I accepted the job more or less—so there was no point in having the job except what else was I going to do". [2] [7] Byatt stayed in the job for "as long as he had lived, which was 11 years", then, she said, "it was like being released from a spell". [2] [7] She came to regard her academic career "very symbolically". [2] She later wrote the poem "Dead Boys". [7] The marriage was dissolved in 1969. Later that year, Byatt married Peter Duffy, and they had two daughters. [15] [7] [14]Byatt's other books include four novels set in 1950s and '60s Britain that together are known as the Frederica Quartet: “The Virgin in the Garden,” published in 1978, followed by “Still Life,” "Babel Tower” and “A Whistling Woman.” She also wrote the 2009 Booker Prize finalist “The Children’s Book,” a sweeping story of Edwardian England centered on a writer of fairy tales. Can you identify any other instances of characters trying to claim ownership over something in Possession? Possession by A.S. Byatt: the past

Possession (1990) is a bestselling Novel by British author A.S. Byatt (1936-present). It centres around two academics researching a previously undiscovered romance between two Victorian Poets. The academics fall in love along the way. Robert Macfarlane noted in The Observer that the Quartet was marred by “excessive use of symbols (spiders, spirals, fire, webs, mirrors), a narrative gnarliness, an overbearing sense of allegory”, and spoke for many critics when he complained of “the ludicrous names of almost all the characters… and the not infrequent stylistic botches. At one point, for instance, two dogs come into a room ‘agitating their sterns’, which I presume is a ghastly attempt to say ‘wagging their tails’ without, for some reason, saying so.” Sir Ian Byatt biography". watercommission.co.uk. Archived from the original on 20 February 2012 . Retrieved 1 January 2022.At first Roland worked with the kind of concentrated curiosity with which he read anything at all by Randolph Ash. This curiosity was a kind of predictive familiarity; he knew the workings of the other man’s mind, he had read what he had read, he was possessed of his characteristic habits of syntax and stress. His mind could leap ahead and hear the rhythm of the unread as though he was the writer, hearing in his brain the ghost-rhythms of the as yet unwritten…” Byatt has famously been engaged in a long-running feud with her novelist sister, Margaret Drabble, over the alleged appropriation of a family tea-set in one of her novels. The pair seldom see each other and each does not read the books of the other.

At the heart of Possession is the love story between the poets Ash and LaMotte. They meet at a literary breakfast in a fashionable part of London and embark on an affair which becomes a personal tragedy for them both. Byatt returned to the 19th century in 2009’s The Children’s Book, which contrasts two different versions of creativity through the lives of a writer and a potter. The novel was shortlisted for that year’s Booker prize.To her immense frustration, what interested the press most about her was her difficult relationship with her younger sister Margaret Drabble, who became a bestselling novelist some decades before Antonia achieved the same feat. They were cast as the Olivia de Havilland and Joan Fontaine of the literary world, and there were suggestions that Antonia’s late success was driven by a determination not just to escape Margaret’s shadow but to eclipse her in turn. If this was true, she arguably succeeded. A. S. Byatt, in part, wrote Possession in response to John Fowles' novel The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969). In an essay in Byatt's nonfiction book, On Histories and Stories, she wrote: Vassell, Nicole (17 November 2023). "Author of Possession and The Children's Book AS Byatt dies aged 87". The Independent . Retrieved 17 November 2023. Critic Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, writing in The New York Times, noted that what he describes as the "wonderfully extravagant novel" is "pointedly subtitled 'A Romance'." [5] He says it is at once "a detective story" and "an adultery novel." [5] An academic researcher in his late twenties. At the start of Possession, Roland feels trapped in both a dead-end job and a relationship. He worries that he will never find success. Researching LaMotte and Ash's relationship gives him a sense of drive and purpose. It also leads him to discover Maud, a woman he truly loves.

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