Possession

Two late-twentieth-century scholars, Roland Michell and Maud Bailey, discover letters suggesting a secret love between the Victorian poets Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte. Their research takes them through libraries, Brittany, and Yorkshire as rival academics and a collector close in. Parallel chapters give the nineteenth-century affair itself in poems, journal entries, and the cost to marriages and reputations. Ash is a public sage of the Browning type; LaMotte a secluded mythological poet with a female companion. The present-day pair must decide how much of the past they will publish or keep. The novel is a double romance of reading and concealment, not a biography of any real Victorian pair.

Bound in grey cloth printed with a colour image. Green endleaves. Blue-green slipcase.