Possession: A Romance

Possession, a beloved literary novel which won the Booker Prize in 1990, is a two-stranded historical romance in which two 20th-century literary scholars enter a complicated relationship after the discovery of love letters in an archived text. The book features long sections of poetry—pastiches in the Victorian style, as well as letters and fictional diary entries. “I was terrified of the poems,” she explained years later. “I knew I was a prose person.” Ultimately, however, she found that she managed. “It really was a sort of experience of being possessed. It was an experience of all the Victorian poems that didn’t exist and should have existed suddenly crowding up like ghosts in Homer and trying to get out. There was no problem to writing any of it. I didn’t have to think about it.”