How we cite our quotes: Possession: A Romance. London: Vintage Books, 1991.
Quote #1
The London Library was Roland's favourite place. It was shabby but civilised, alive with history but inhabited also by living poets and thinkers who could be found squatting on the slotted metal floors of the stacks, or arguing pleasantly at the turning of the stair. Here Carlyle had come, here George Eliot had progressed through the bookshelves. (1.2)
Right off the bat, Possession establishes itself as a book about reading. We would have a very different impression of Roland Mitchell if his favorite place in the world were Wembley Stadium or the London Bank, or something like that.
Quote #2
It was this urgency above all that moved and shocked Roland. He thought he knew Ash fairly well, as well as anyone might know a man whose life seemed to be all in his mind, who lived a quiet and exemplary married life for forty years, whose correspondence was voluminous indeed, but guarded, courteous, and not of the most lively. Roland liked that in Randolph Henry Ash. (1.22)
A recurring theme throughout Possession concerns our ability, as readers, to get to know people through their written works. In fact, not only does Roland Mitchell feel that he knows R. H. Ash, he also feels that his favorite author is somehow part of him. Which writers feel like that for you?
Quote #3
There were times when Blackadder allowed himself to see clearly that he would end his working life, that was to say his conscious thinking life, in this task, that all his thoughts would have been another man's thoughts, all his work another man's work. And then he thought it did not perhaps matter so greatly. He did after all find Ash fascinating, even after all these years. It was a pleasant subordination, if he was a subordinate. (3.18)
Like Roland Mitchell, James Blackadder is intellectually devoted to Randolph Henry Ash's writings. Luckily for him, he's pretty content to spend his life editing another man's literary output.
Quote #4
He felt suddenly angry with Maud, who was standing stock still, in the dark, not moving a finger to help him, not urging, as she with her emotional advantage might well have done, further exploration of hidden treasures or pathetic dead caskets. […] Then, behind him, chill and clear, Maud spoke a kind of incantation.
Dolly keeps a Secret
Safer than a Friend
Dolly's Silent Sympathy
Lasts without end. (5.139-40)
As we learn, Christabel LaMotte was a big fan of riddles. Fortunately for Maud Bailey and Roland Mitchell—and for all of the other twentieth-century scholars in the novel who study Randolph Henry Ash's and LaMotte's writings—Christabel used some of her poems as hiding places for secret clues and instructions. Thanks to this poem about "Dolly," Maud and Roland find the place where Christabel hid all of her correspondence with Ash.
Quote #5
It was a great pleasure to talk to you at dear Crabb's breakfast party. […] May I have the hope that you too enjoyed our talk—and may I have the pleasure of calling on you? I know you live very quietly, but I would be very quiet—I only want to discuss Dante and Shakespeare and Wordsworth and Coleridge and Goethe and Schiller and Webster and Ford and Sir Thomas Browne et hoc genus omne, not forgetting, of course, Christabel LaMotte and the ambitious Fairy Project. (5.188)
It's clear from Randolph Henry Ash's first letter to Christabel LaMotte that one of the main attractions in their relationship was their mutual love of literature. In each other, the two poets found kindred literary spirits.
Quote #6
Given this sympathy with Petrarchan adoration, it is not surprising that he should have waited so devotedly on what may be called the Christian scruples or caprices of Ellen Best and her father. (6.45)
In Mortimer Cropper's opinion, Randolph Henry Ash's admiration for the poetry of Petrarch had a profound influence on his own romantic ideals and desires. Although the novel itself doesn't confirm or deny Cropper's hypothesis, Possession does show us lots of other examples of characters whose love lives have been influenced by their favorite literary works.
Quote #7
Beatrice read Ragnarök and Ask to Embla. She took a First and fell in love with Randolph Henry Ash. Such loves were once not uncommon. (7.1)
Beatrice Nest is one of those characters in Possession whose romantic ideals have been shaped by their favorite literary works. Unfortunately for her, she never finds a real-life version of the kind of love that she saw represented in the poems of Ash.
Quote #8
Today I laid down Melusina having come trembling to the end of this marvellous work. What shall I say of it? It is truly original, although the general public may have trouble in recognizing its genius, because it makes no concession to vulgar frailties of imagination, and because its virtues are so far removed in some ways at least from those expected of the weaker sex. Here is no swooning sentiment, no timid purity, no softly gloved lady-like patting of the reader's sensibility, but lively imagination, but force and vigour. (7.68)
During her life, Christabel LaMotte felt that only two people had really appreciated her writing properly: Blanche Glover and Randolph Henry Ash. She couldn't have known that Ellen Ash also admired her work and was big enough to recognize its strengths despite the fact that Christabel had had an affair with her husband.
Quote #9
I should add that my poems do not, I think, spring from the Lyric Impulse—but from something restless and myriad-minded and partial and observing and analytic and curious[…]. What makes me a Poet, and not a novelist—is to do with the singing of the Language itself. For the difference between poets and novelists is this—that the former write for the life of the language—and the latter write for the betterment of the world. (8.23)
As we read the Ash-LaMotte correspondence, we get windows into their deepest thoughts about the nature and purpose of their own writing, as well as into their thoughts about the purpose and power of literature in general.
Quote #10
It is possible for a writer to make, or remake at least, for a reader, the primary pleasures of eating, or drinking, or looking on, or sex. […] They do not habitually elaborate on the equally intense pleasure of reading. There are obvious reasons for this, the most obvious being the regressive nature of the pleasure, a mise-en-âbime even, where words draw attention to the power and delight of words, and so on ad infinitum, thus making the imagination experience something papery and dry […]. (26.39)
This is the only passage in Possession in which the novel's narrator reflects on the "power and delight" of literature in such a self-conscious way. But hey, who doesn't love a little metacommentary now and then?