How we cite our quotes: Possession: A Romance. London: Vintage Books, 1991.
Quote #1
At 11.00 he found what he thought was the relevant passage in Vico. Vico had looked for historical fact in the poetic metaphors of myth and legend; this piecing together was his 'new science'. His Proserpine was the corn, the origin of commerce and community. Randolph Henry Ash's Proserpine had been seen as a Victorian reflection of religious doubt, a meditation on the myths of Resurrection. (1.6)
As Possession will make clear, the Victorian religious doubt that the novel's twentieth-century scholars see in Randolph Henry Ash's work was caused, in part, by advances in scientific knowledge about the natural world. Like many of his contemporaries, R. H. Ash finds it hard to preserve his faith as he explores new discoveries in biology and geology.
Quote #2
He had once seen a naturalist on the television who seemed to him to be an analogue of himself. This man went out with a pouch and gathered up owl pellets, which he labeled, and later, took apart with forceps, bathed in glass beakers of various cleansing fluids, ordering and rearranging the orts and fragments of the owl's compressed package of bone, tooth and fur, in order to reconstitute the dead shrew or slow-worm which had run, died, and made its way through owl-gut. (3.19)
James Blackadder's interest in the natural world extends only so far as he can use it as a source of metaphors for his own life—and specifically for his scholarly work on the poetry and plays of Randolph Henry Ash.
Quote #3
The wolds of Lincolnshire are a small surprise. Tennyson grew up in one of their tight twisting valleys. From them he made the cornfields of immortal Camelot.
On either side the river lie
Long fields of barley and of rye
That clothe the wold and meet the sky.
Roland saw immediately that the word 'meet' was precise and surprising, not vague. They drove over the plain, up the rolling road, out of the valley. (5.1-3)
More than once throughout Possession, the characters experience small epiphanies about literature when they visit the landscapes that inspired the writing. It turns out the reading and studying literature isn't just something you do in an ivory tower or academic office—it's really part of your everyday life, too.
Quote #4
He, Cropper, on the other hand, had early begun to trace the journeyings of Randolph Ash—not consecutively, but as the chances presented themselves, so that his first expedition had been to the North Yorkshire Moors and coast where Ash had enjoyed a solitary walking-tour, combined with amateur marine biologising, in 1859. (6.40)
Even though we aren't really meant to like Mortimer Cropper very much, it has to be said that he has long known certain things that Roland Mitchell and Maud Bailey discover much later in their academic lives—like the value of visiting the natural landscapes that fired their favourite authors' imaginations.
Quote #5
I have read other of your poems of Insect Life, and marveled at the way they combined the brilliance and fragility of those winged things—or creeping—with something too of the biting and snapping and devouring that may be seen under a microscope. It would be a brave poet indeed who would undertake a true description of the Queen Bee—or Wasp—or Ant—as we now know them to be—having for centuries supposed these centres of communal worship and activity to be Male Rulers […]. (10.2)
Throughout Randolph Henry Ash's correspondence with Christabel LaMotte, there is strong evidence of his diverse interests in the natural world. A. S. Byatt also uses these letters as opportunities to highlight many different kinds of scientific discoveries that changed human perceptions of the world—like the discovery that many insect colonies have a "queen" and not a "king" at their centers.
Quote #6
I run on, and have not communicated to you the subject of my insect-poem, which is to be the short and miraculous—and on the whole tragic—life of Swammerdam, who discovered in Holland the optic glass which revealed to us the endless reaches and ceaseless turmoil of the infinitely small just as the great Galileo turned his optic tube on the majestic motions of the planets and beyond them the silent spheres of the infinitely great. (10.4)
As we see here, Randolph Henry Ash isn't just interested in scientific discoveries about the natural world itself: he's also fascinated by the human personalities that give rise to those discoveries—and by the kinds of human responses that greet those discoveries when they're made public.
Quote #7
That glass of water you hold to my lips,
Had I my lenses, would reveal to us
Not limped clarity as we suppose—
Pure water—but a seething, striving horde
Of animalcules lashing dragon-tails
Propelled by springs and coils and hairlike fronds
Like whales athwart the oceans of the globe. (11.9)
This excerpt from Randolph Henry Ash's poem on the biologist Jan Swammerdam gives us another taste of Ash's diverse interests in the natural world. Here, we see him describing microbial life through comparisons to the biggest creatures in the ocean. That surprising and counterintuitive comparison really helps to emphasize the sublimity of the "infinitely small" (10.4).
Quote #8
The Pickering-Grosmont line travels through the Newtondale Gorge—a cleft formed during the Ice Age—where the engine produces, amongst romantically desolate moorland, a sublime volanic eruption of its own, due to the steepness of the gradient. It put me in mind of Milton's Saton, winging his black way through the asphaltic fumes of Chaos—and of Lyell's solid, patient yet inspired work on the raising of the hills and the carving of the valleys by ice. (12.17)
The letters that Randolph Henry Ash writes home to his wife during his expedition to North Yorkshire reveal just how much he knew about geology. Unlike some of his contemporaries, Ash seems to have no difficulty accepting the vast geological age of the Earth. You'll find no religious or existential despair in here, at least as far as these issues go.
Quote #9
And what surfaces of the earth do we women choose to celebrate, who have appeared typically in phallocentric texts as a penetrable hole, inviting or abhorrent, surrounded by, fringed with—something? Women writers and painters are seen to have created their own significantly evasive landscapes, with features which deceive or elude the penetrating gaze, tactile landscapes which do not privilege the dominant stare. (13.7)
Byattisn't just interested in exploring the relationship between "man" and the natural world: some of her characters also muse on women's relationships with nature, too. This excerpt from Leonora Stern's book on the works of Christabel LaMotte lends a distinctly feminist flair to possible interpretations of natural landscapes and their representation in literature.
Quote #10
The ring of living beauty drawn about our shores was a very thin and fragile one. It had existed all those centuries solely in consequence of the indifference, the blissful ignorance of man. These rock-basins, fringed by corallines, filled with still water almost as pellucid as the upper air itself, thronged with beautiful sensitive forms of life—they exist no longer, they are all profaned and emptied, and vulgarized. An army of 'collectors' has passed over them, and ravaged every corner of them. (13.17)
This excerpt from Mortimer Cropper's biography of Randolph Henry Ash prompts us to consider the consequences of Ash's trendy interest in marine biology. At the same time, it also echoes and amplifies one of Possession's most important themes—the relationship between knowledge, purity, corruption, and death and destruction.