BYATT, A. S. ~ Possession. A Romance. Signed by the author.

FIRST UK PRINTING. Chatto & Windus, London: 1990.

8vo., navy blue publisher's boards, lettered in gilt to spine; together in the unclipped pictorial dustwrapper (£13.95) featuring the image of 'The Beguiling of Merlin' by Sir Edward Burne-Jones; and a black and white photograph of the author to the lower flap; matching blue ribbon marker; THE BOOK near-fine, slightly sunned and bumped at edges, with overall light toning to the paper stock, as is common; the WRAPPER aside from very minor creasing to the edges, fine. The wrapper is protected in a removable Brodart archival cover. First UK edition, first printing. This copy signed by the author to the title page. A 1990 Booker Prize bookmark is also loosely inserted. The Booker Prize-winning novel by A. S. Byatt, the English critic, novelist, poet and short-story writer. 'Possession' was her fifth novel, and follows two academics as they trace the romantic relationship between two fictional poets, Randolph Henry Ash (loosely based on a combination of Robert Browning and Alfred Lord Tennyson) and Christabel LaMotte (based on Christina Rossetti). Byatt had herself studied at Cambridge, and was fascinated by Victorian literature. She cited Browning and Tennyson among her influences, though she was criticial of Christina Rossetti. The book was written partially in response to John Fowles 'The French Lieutenant's Woman', about which she wrote that "Fowles has said that the nineteenth-century narrator was assuming the omniscience of a god. I think rather the opposite is the case—this kind of fictive narrator can creep closer to the feelings and inner life of characters—as well as providing a Greek chorus—than any first-person mimicry. In 'Possession' I used this kind of narrator deliberately three times in the historical narrative—always to tell what the historians and biographers of my fiction never discovered, always to heighten the reader's imaginative entry into the world of the text." In 2002, the book was adapted into 2002 a feature film starring Gwyneth Paltrow.

BINDING: Hardcover
CONDITION: Near Fine
JACKET: Fine