Possession: A Romance Novel - Historical Love Story for Book Clubs & Literary Enthusiasts

'A written work that is regarded as having artistic merit'. That is how my dictionary describes 'literature'. This book is a literary romance - and a novel, too. 'Possession' by A S Byatt is one of my very favourite books, which I have read perhaps five or six times. It is one of the few books that I prefer in its printed form - for visual reasons. I have recently bought and read it on my Kindle - and am glad to have it available even on my mobile phone: but I prefer my dog-eared paperback copy. It's the layout of the poetry that does it. A few of the times I have read the whole book; some of the times I have skated over the long poems and sagas that Miss Byatt has written in the style of her Victorian hero, the eminent poet Professor Randolph Henry Ash. To me, there is no doubting the artistic merit of this double love story, which is so crafted that one is driven through with impatience, fascinated to know the final outcome(s). Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1990, I wondered why it had not won but my conclusion was that the judges felt that the author indulged herself by not thinning out so much apparently irrelevant but beautiful prose. As a practised reader of this romance, I now know what to leave out - and still end up by enjoying the brilliant plots and passionate love stories. A S Byatt quotes Nathaniel Hawthorne, in the preface to his 'The House of the Seven Gables' as saying that 'When a writer calls his work a Romance, it need hardly be observbed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitlted to assume, had he professed to be writing a Novel. The latter form of composition is presumed to aim at a very minute fidelity, not merely to the possible, but to the probable and ordinary course of man's experience.' The author gives me no reason to dispute her facts and I am convinced that Randolph Ash and his virginal lover both existed. Equally real are the humble academic, Roland Mitchell (who discovered the draft letters by Prof Ash that no one knew about) and the formidable Dr Maud Bailey, feminist and expert on women poets of the same period, (around the 1860s). It is definitely romantic, convincing and artistic. So, from me five stars because 'I love it!' And I conclude it's a true example of modern literature.