Possession Themes

Oh, romantic love. Is it the warm glow of a steady, well-protected flame? Is it the all-consuming blaze of passion? Is it what happens when two people decide to belong to each other for the rest of...

In the same way that Possession is all about exploring the ins and outs of the little thing we call love, the novel is also fascinated by the mystery of human sexuality. To some extent, Byatt repre...

A lot has changed between the Victorian era and the present, and Possession is into exploring the burdens and limitations that social conventions can put on women during any age. Byatt tells about...

In Possession, A. S. Byatt is all a exploring the many ways in which history can be understood—or misunderstood—by those who look back on it from comfy vantage points in their own "present" day...

Out of all of Possession'sprimary characters, it's Randolph Henry Ash who most cares about the natural world. Ash might even be said to embody Victorian England's complex and sometimes troubled per...

Whereas Randolph Henry Ash is Possession's representative of Victorian ideas about the relationship between human beings and the natural world, Christabel LaMotte embodies Victorian beliefs, doubts...

Folks, Possession is a novel that ranks the "intense pleasure of reading" on the same scale as "the primary pleasures of eating, or drinking, or looking on, or sex" (26.39). A. S. Byatt clearly tak...

A. S. Byatt has said that Possession plays with the form of the "campus novel" just as much as it does with the forms of "the detective story, the biography, the mediaeval verse Romance, the modern...