The Solitary Thoughts of Alexander Selkirk" was one of those poems, the musings of the castaway sailor on his island.

Winner of England's Booker Prize and a literary sensation, Possession traces the lives of a pair of young academics as they uncover a clandestine relationship between two long-dead Victorian poets. okay first of all I was wondering what could be interesting in school students studying the life of poets? It was of this golden apple that Virgil, most learned in heroic antiquities, made the golden bough Aeneas carries into the Inferno or Underworld. The librarian fetched a checked duster, and wiped away the dust, a black, thick, tenacious Victorian dust, a dust composed of smoke and fog particles accumulated before the Clean Air Acts.There are parts of this book that I have such a strong, bodily anchored memory of, that I have connected to so strongly that my body has a sense memory of what it should do at the time when I read those words. Can you identify any other instances of characters trying to claim ownership over something in Possession? Famous romances include Sense and Sensibility (1811) by Jane Austen and Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South (1854). I've shared the exact "blind decade-and-a-half dislike" of the author since I too threw aside Still Life "in disgust" in my early teens. After everything has ended, Roland and Maud admit that they have fallen in love and begin a relationship together that somewhat mirrors that of Ash and LaMotte.

Possession is an exhilarating novel of wit and romance, at once a literary detective novel and a triumphant love story.I am convinced that you must undertake that grand Fairy Topic--you will make something highly strange and original of it.

I know you go out in company very little, and was the more fortunate that dear Crabb managed to entice you to his breakfast table. And, as the cover proclaims, it is a romance--a set of entwined love stories written with impossible precision and believability. When he left, with his green and tomato boxes heaped on his Selected Ash, they nodded affably from behind the issue desk.But that is not the only song I hear, for raising above the melody, I distinclty discern Byatt’s contralto singing the only truth that not even rigorous scholarship can claim to possess. This is the sort of read that cleans out all the nonsense from my brain and leaves me with what is essentially important again. The story could have been told without it, but I do think it would have lessened the impact to have had the poems discussed so frequently and never have seen any of them. If the world refuses to listen, she'll wedge the truth into our ears with a handful of steel-plated swabs.