Synopsis (from B&N.com): "Winner of England's Booker Prize and a literary sensation Possession is an exhilarating novel of wit and romance, at once an intellectual mystery and a triumphant love story. As a pair of young scholars research the lives of two Victorian poets, they uncover their letters, journals, and poems, and track their movements from London to Yorkshire -- from spiritualist séances to the fairy-haunted far west of Brittany. What emerges is an extraordinary counterpoint of passion and ideas."
This is a beautifully written novel -- I can understand why it received the amount of praise it did when it was released. It was a little slow going at first, but then picked up so that I didn't want to stop reading, always a good sign. I have to admit that there were parts that I didn't understand, including much of the poetry, but then poetry is one of those areas that I've never been terribly comfortable with. The other "problem" parts relate to the high-minded academic approaches to literature on the part of some of the characters, very theoretical, for which I have never felt an attraction -- it feels too much like scientific dissecting of the work, instead of enjoying the work for its own sake. But overall, I enjoyed it and am not sorry to have read it.
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