How we cite our quotes: Possession: A Romance. London: Vintage Books, 1991.
Quote #1
Vico had looked for historical fact in the poetic metaphors of myth and legend; this piecing together was his 'new science'. His Proserpine was the corn, the origin of commerce and community. Randolph Henry Ash's Proserpine had been seen as a Victorian reflection of religious doubt, a meditation on the myths of resurrection. […] Blackadder had a belief that she represented, for Randolph Ash, a personification of History itself in its early mythical days. (1.6)
Possession introduces us to historical themes really early on, and the novel continues to expand on them throughout the rest of its 500+ pages. We mean, we're talking Greek mythology here, and it doesn't get a whole lot older than that. And yet we all still know those stories, right?
Quote #2
Folded into the page of Vico on which the passage appeared was a bill for candles on the back of which Ash had written: 'The individual appears for an instant, joins the community of thought, modifies it and dies; but the species, that dies not, reaps the fruit of his ephemeral existence.' (1.9)
As we'll see throughout Possession, the significance of the individual person within the long span of history—including both the distant past and the distant future—is a recurring theme in Randolph Henry Ash's writing and thought. In his view, people ought to be remembered for what they've contribute to humanity as a whole. No pressure.
Quote #3
In 1986 he was twenty-nine, a graduate of Prince Albert College, London (1978) and a PhD of the same university (1985). His doctoral dissertation was entitled History, Historians and Poetry? A Study of the Presentation of Historical 'Evidence' in the Poems of Randolph Henry Ash. He had written it under the supervision of James Blackadder, which had been a discouraging experience. (2.3)
Roland Mitchell's doctoral dissertation focused on questions relating to history and historiography in Randolph Henry Ash's writings. As readers, we may wonder if he chose this topic himself or if it was suggested to him by James Blackadder, who has also written on "relative historiography" in R.H. Ash's works (1.6). As they say, professors themselves may not know it, but what they sometimes want most is to reproduce themselves.
Quote #4
His fate was decided by a seminar on dating. […] The dating handout contained a troubadour lyric, a piece of dramatic Jacobean verse, some satirical couplets, a blank verse meditation on volcanic mud and a love-sonnet. Blackadder, schooled by his grandfather, saw immediately that all of these poems were by Randolph Henry Ash, examples of his ventriloquism, of his unwieldy range. (3.15)
As we learn, Randolph Henry Ash's interest in history wasn't limited to natural history or socio-political history; he was also interested in the history of literary forms, and he made a habit of writing poems as though they had been written in various centuries before his own. In this, R. H. Ash shares something in common with A. S. Byatt herself, as Possession is chock-full of her attempts to "recreate" Victorian language and writing faithfully.
Quote #5
George's great-great-grandfather planted all this woodland, you know. Partly for timber, partly because he loved trees. He tried to get everything to grow that he could. The rarer the tree, the more of a challenge. George keeps it up. […] Woods are diminishing in this part of the world. And hedges too. We've lost acres and acres of woodland to fast grain farming. George goes up and down protecting his trees. Like some old goblin. Somebody has to have a sense of the history of things. (5.106)
Lady Joan Bailey's comments to Maud Bailey and Roland Mitchell help to develop one of Possession's most fascinating themes: the relationship between natural landscapes and the preservation of memory. As Lady Bailey suggests, Sir George's steady care for the woods surrounding Seal Court is a way of preserving physical remnants of British history.
Quote #6
My father, who suffered from what would now be called periods of clinical depression […] amused himself from time to time by allowing me to examine these treasures, to the cataloguing of which he devoted his more lucid days, somewhat unsuccessfully, since he could never establish any guiding principle as to how they should be ordered. […] 'Here, Morty, my boy,' he would say to me, 'here is History to hold in your hand.' (6.26)
More than any other character in Possession, Mortimer Cropper believes that the best way to preserve memories of the past is to collect objects from the past. Although the novel generally represents his acquisitiveness in a negative light, his instincts to collect and preserve aren't all that different from other characters' ways of keeping history alive.
Quote #7
She drove through the park, much of which had been planted by that earlier Sir George who had married Christabel's sister Sophie, and had had a passion for trees, trees from all parts of the distant earth, Persian plum, Turkey oak, Himalayan pine, Caucasian walnut and the Judas tree. He had had his generation's expansive sense of time—he had inherited hundred-year-old oaks and beeches and had planted spreads of woodland, rides and coppices he would never see. (8.42)
Earlier, when Lady Joan Bailey spoke of the connection between tending the forest and preserving British history, it might have been possible to view her words as her own personal opinion. Here, Possession's narrator echoes her sentiment and suggests that the Seal Court forest is the product of a generation that was both more forward-looking and more backward-looking than Maud Bailey's own.
Quote #8
Women, not trees, were Maud's true pastoral concern. Her idea of these primeval creatures included her generation's sense of their imminent withering and dying, under the drip of acid rain, or in the invisible polluted gusts of the wind. She was visited by a sudden vision of them dancing, golden-green, in a bright spring a hundred years ago, flexible saplings, tossed and resilient. This thickened forest, her own humming metal car, her prying curiosity about whatever had been Christabel's life, seemed suddenly to be the ghostly things, feeding on, living through, the young vitality of the past. (8.43)
Just to hammer home the point, Possession's narrator gives us this brief, visionary moment to emphasize the difference between Maud Bailey's historical vantage point and that of the generations that came before her.
Quote #9
The truth is—my dear Miss LaMotte—that we live in an old world—a tired world—a world that has gone on piling up speculation and observations until truths that might have been graspable in the bright Dayspring of human morning […] are now obscured by palimpsest on palimpsest, by thick horny growths over that clear vision—as moulting serpents, before they burst forth with their new flexible-brilliant skins, are blinded by the crusts of their old one […].(10.27)
Through one of his letters to Christabel LaMotte, we readers catch a glimpse of Randolph Henry Ash's complex and deeply poetic perspective on the history of human thought. It's not for nothing that historical themes preoccupied so much of his poetry.
Quote #10
How may what is born, is formed by gradual causes, transmit this form to its offspring—transmit the type—tho the individual may fail? This if I mistake not, is not known. I may cut off a sprig of a tree—and grow a whole tree—roots and crown and all from that—and how may that be? How does the twig-slip know to form root and branch? (12.26)
In this passage from one of Randolph Henry Ash's letters to his wife Ellen, we hear an echo of his earlier words on the significance of the individual life within the life of the species. Although Ash is puzzling over a scientific question here, his musings have deeper symbolic meaning: he's thinking about generation and continuity—the history and the future of species—in terms that apply to his own significance as a human being—and, though he doesn't know it yet, as a father-to-be.