The consequences of this highly improbable self-view are devastating, as it turns out. He had been trained to see his idea of his 'self' as an illusion, to be replaced by a discontinuous machineryĪnd electrical message-network of various desires, ideological beliefs and responses, language-forms and hormones and pheromones.'' To see himself, theoretically, as a crossing-place for a number of systems, all loosely connected.

Thus begins an unlikely but dazzling quest for what literary critics and historians once, with unfounded confidence,Īlong the path, Mitchell, an old-fashioned scholar, falls in love with Maud Bailey, a feminist academic, but he cannot trust anything so out of date as a ''self'' that falls in love. Which reveal a hitherto unknown, and clearly affectionate, attachment between Ash and a woman not his wife. It is Roland Mitchell's total absorption in the world of Randolph Henry Ash that enables him to grasp at once the potential value of the letters, It was bandaged about and about with dirty white tape, tied in a neat bow.''Īs it happens, out of this dusty old book pop two unsigned letters written in Ash's unmistakable hand. Its spine was missing, or, rather, protruded from amongst the leaves Its boards were bowed and creaking it had been maltreated in its own time. Byatt writes, ''was thick and black and covered with dust. Library, where Roland Mitchell - a postdoctoral research assistant at London University and the novel's hero of sorts - is rummaging through an old book that once belonged to the man he worships: Randolph Henry Ash,Ī famous Victorian poet and obvious stand-in for Robert Browning. ''Possession'' begins in 1986 in the Reading Room of the London Byatt is a gifted observer, able to discern the exact but minor details that bring whole worlds into being.

S anyone who has read her previous novels, including ''Shadow of a Sun,'' or her stories or her critical studies OctoUnearthing the Secret Lover By JAY PARINI

As byatt 1990 novel