Book Reviews
This cerebral extravaganza of a story zigzags with unembarrassed zest across an imaginative terrain bristling with symbolism and symmetries, shimmering with myth and legend, and haunted everywhere by presences of the past.... Possession is eloquent about the intense pleasures of reading. And, with sumptuous artistry, it provides a feast of them.
Sunday Times (London)
Byatt is the most formidably equipped of contemporary novelists.... The great merit of [her] writing...is that it continually engages the reader's mind.
Daily Telegraph (UK)
...A.S. Byatt's wonderfully extravagant novel...accomplishes its essential purpose. It makes one read and reflect on language and consider what it meant to another age. As Maud says to Roland, "we have to make a real effort of imagination to know hwat it felt like to be them, here, believeing in these things".... In Possession, Ms. Byatt has made that effort. And to a remarkable degree succeeded.
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt - New York Times
A masterpiece of wordplay and adventure, a novel that compares with Stendhal and Joyce.
Los Angeles Times
Two contemporary scholars, each studying one of two Victorian poets, reconstruct their subjects' secret extramarital affair through poems, journal entries, letters and modern scholarly analysis of the period.... [A]n ambitious and wholly satisfying work, a nearly perfect novel.
Publishers Weekly
(Audio version.) This Booker Prize-winning novel is a good candidate for an oral reading, and Virginia Leishman performs beautifully. A wonderful mix of poetry and posturing literary criticism, part mystery, part romance, this tale is an entertaining juxtaposition of the 19th and 20th centuries. Leishman's reading emphasizes this contrast as she elegantly modulates poetry and then clips her words in a businesslike manner when reading the 20th-century analyses of 19th-century poetry. Maud Bailey and Roland Mitchell, scholars of Christabel Lamotte and Randolph Henry Ash, are brought together and to life through the letters, diaries, and poetry of the two poets. Uncertain of their own identities, Bailey and Mitchell can easily lose themselves in the study of literature. We become as involved as the scholars through a judicious sampling of belles lettres and literary criticism, until finally Lamotte and Ash materialize and speak for themselves. The supporting characters are humorous stereotypes that Leishman portrays with various accents and annoying drawls to match their idiosyncrasies. Highly recommended. —Juleigh Muirhead Clark, John D. Rockefeller Jr. Lib., Williamsburg, VA
Library Journal