THE ARTISTIC DISTINCTIVENESS OF A. S. BYATT’S POSSESSION IN THE CONTEXT OF THE BRITISH NEO-VICTORIAN NOVEL

A. S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance (1990) brings together the reconstruction of Victorian literary culture and a critical examination of how literary history is written. The novel follows contemporary scholars Roland Michell and Maud Bailey, whose investigation into the lives of two fictional Victorian writers, Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte, leads to the discovery of a concealed relationship. Yet the recovery of this private history raises broader questions about the ways in which the past is documented, interpreted, and represented. Through archival materials, embedded poetry, letters, diaries, fairy-tale motifs, and scenes of academic inquiry, Byatt explores the limits of historical evidence and the role of narrative imagination in shaping accounts of the past. Drawing on research into neo-Victorian fiction, historiographic metafiction, gender and authorship, as well as recent studies of the novel, the article considers the interplay between archival investigation and literary invention, the position of women writers in literary history, and the convergence of detective fiction, romance, and the academic novel. The discussion centres on Roland’s discovery in the London Library, the poems and other writings attributed to Ash and LaMotte, and the ethical implications of interpreting another person’s life and work. The analysis identifies three interdependent features of Byatt’s neo-Victorian poetics: documents that function simultaneously as evidence and literary compositions; a detective-romance plot that tests the ethics of scholarly ownership; and parallel female authorship narratives that expose the limits of biographical reduction. The novel thereby makes historical reconstruction both the subject of its fiction and the principle of its narrative organisation.