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Oct 28, 1991
A.S. Byatt first appeared at the 92Y Poetry Center in October of 1991, for a reading from Possession, which had won the Booker Prize the year before.
“I started writing in other voices really when I wrote Possession, partly because I was somehow dissatisfied with the ‘voice’ of realist prose about people’s feelings,” Ms. Byatt said in a recent interview with Bookforum. “That is only one way to write. So I wrote parodies of scholarly analysis, biographical musings, Victorian love letters and poems, and I think this makes the ordinary ‘storytelling’ voice in turn more surprising and problematic. When people ask me why I write, I say it’s because I love the language and what it can do. I think I’m not very interested in self-expression.”
In this excerpt, which comes from Chapter 8 of the novel, Ms. Byatt conjures the voices of all four of her main characters—two modern-day researchers (Roland and Maud) and two Victorian poets (Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte).
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