Looking back at 1990 Booker-winning novel ‘Possession’ by A.S. Byatt, who passed away this month

A.S. Byatt was a writer passionate about literature, art, and life. Her works, including novels, short stories, and essays, were informed by her interests. Two of her books, Still Life and The Matisse Stories, were inspired by the works of Van Gogh and Matisse. Her debut novel, The Shadow of the Sun, was written while she was at Cambridge. She also wrote critical works on Wordsworth and Coleridge and the novels of Iris Murdoch. Her 1990 novel, Possession: A Romance, won the Booker Prize and was made into a film in 2002. Byatt wrote all the poems attributed to the fictional poets in the novel, and also included works by Shakespeare, Donne, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and more. Byatt's writing was a celebration of literature, art, and life.

For A.S. Byatt, who passed away on November 16, writing was the most important thing in her life. For half-a-century and more, she pursued the written word, publishing novels, short stories, essays, which were informed by her great interest in literature, history, myths and folktales, poetry, art — and life. 

To give just one example, two of her books can be set beside works of the great artists Vincent van Gogh and Henri Matisse. Still Life, the second in the Frederica Quartet series, foregrounds the art of Van Gogh, describing his paintings and quoting from his letters to his brother Theo; and The Matisse Stories is a wonderful accompanying set-piece to the artist’s well-known work, including the ‘Pink Nude’.

Antonia Byatt, born Antonia Drabble, sister of writer Margaret Drabble, published her debut novel The Shadow of the Sun in 1964. She said she had written it while at Cambridge between 1954 and 1957. It’s a story about a young woman with an idealistic father, Henry Severall, who Byatt later said was simply her “secret self”, someone “who saw everything too bright, too fierce, too much, like Van Gogh’s cornfields, or Samuel Palmer’s overloaded magic apples, or the Coleridge of the flashing eyes and floating hair, or the Blake who saw infinity in a grain of sand”.

She would go on to write critical works on Wordsworth and Coleridge and the novels of Iris Murdoch. Byatt taught at University College, London, and after a writing hiatus following the death of her son in an accident in 1972, she took up the Frederica quartet. The first one, The Virgin in the Garden, which she dedicated to her son Charles, was published in 1978. It follows the Potter family, and particularly Frederica, as they prepare to celebrate Elizabeth II’s coronation. 

Still Life followed in 1985, in which Frederica is at Cambridge and is hungry for knowledge, sex and love. The last two in the series are Babel Tower (1996) and A Whistling Woman (2002). But it’s with Byatt’s 1990 novel, Possession: A Romance, that she earned both critical and popular praise. It was a steeped-in-literature bestseller which went on to win the Booker Prize.

In the novel, under the calm and serious background of two academics researching the life of two fictional Victorian poets, something else is going on, something wild and less influenced by reason and order. 

While Maud Bailey is looking closely at the life of a little known 19th century poet, Christabel LaMotte, Roland Mitchell is poring over the work of the celebrated Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash. They find out a secret in Ash’s life, through his letters, which is that though happily married, he had an affair with LaMotte.