Possession

Roland Michell, an academic research assistant, is completing some work in the London Library, when he comes across two unfinished letters written by the Victorian Poet, Randolph Henry Ash. These letters have obviously not been found by anyone else and they are not to his wife but to an unknown woman. Roland, whose entire academic life has been devoted to studying Ash, decides, recklessly to pocket the letters and try to determine exactly who they were written to.

This is the beginning of a quest that will change literary history and with the help of a feminist literary scholar Maud Bailey, they are determined to find out the truth behind these letters. Certain other characters hear about the letters and are eager to get their hands on them for their own financial gain and will do so, by any means necessary, and so the chase begins.


Cast:
Maud …… Jemma Redgrave
Roland …… Harry Hadden-Paton
Ash ……. James d'arcy
Lamotte ….. Rachael Stirling
Blackadder ….. Bill Paterson
Cropper ….. Matthew Marsh
George …… Kenneth Cranham
Joan ……. Joanna David
Beatrice Nest …… Stella Gonet
Euan …… Nicholas Boulton
Fergus …… Jonjo O'Neil
Hildebrand ….. Robert Portal
Val …… Laura Pyper
Leonora …. Lorelei King
Raoul/Toby Byng …. Sam Dale
Mrs Wapshott/Mrs Cammish/Mrs lees ….. Jane Whittenshaw
Beth/PA/Mrs Judge/Librarian …… Rachel Atkins
Girl …… Sylvie Goodwin

Director: Celia de Wolff
A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.

"Literary critics make natural detectives," says Maud Bailey, heroine of a mystery where the clues lurk in university libraries, old letters, and dusty journals. Together with Roland Michell, a fellow academic and accidental sleuth, Maud discovers a love affair between the two Victorian writers the pair has dedicated their lives to studying: Randolph Ash, a literary great long assumed to be a devoted and faithful husband, and Christabel La Motte, a lesser-known "fairy poetess" and chaste spinster. At first, Roland and Maud's discovery threatens only to alter the direction of their research, but as they unearth the truth about the long-forgotten romance, their involvement becomes increasingly urgent and personal. Desperately concealing their purpose from competing researchers, they embark on a journey that pulls each of them from solitude and loneliness, challenges the most basic assumptions they hold about themselves, and uncovers their unique entitlement to the secret of Ash and La Motte's passion.

Winner of the 1990 Booker Prize–the U.K.'s highest literary award–Possession is a gripping and compulsively readable novel. A.S. Byatt exquisitely renders a setting rich in detail and texture. Her lush imagery weaves together the dual worlds that appear throughout the novel–the worlds of the mind and the senses, of male and female, of darkness and light, of truth and imagination–into an enchanted and unforgettable tale of love and intrigue. –Lisa Whipple –This text refers to the Paperback edition.

From Publishers Weekly
The English author of Still Life fuses an ambitious and wholly satisfying work, a nearly perfect novel. Two contemporary scholars, each immersed in the study of one of two Victorian poets, discover evidence of a previously unimagined relationship between their subjects: R. H. Ash and Christabel LaMotte had secretly conducted an extramarital romance. The scholars, "possessed" by their dramatic finds, cannot bring themselves to share their materials with the academic community; instead, they covertly explore clues in the poets' writings in order to reconstruct the affair and its enigmatic aftermath. Byatt persuasively interpolates the lovers' correspondence and "their" poems; the journal entries and letters of other interested parties; and modern-day scholarly analysis of the period. One of the poets is posthumously dubbed "the great ventriloquist"; because of Byatt's success in projecting diverse and distinct voices, it is tempting to apply the label to her as well. Merely to do so, however, would ignore even greater skills: her superb and perpetually surprising plotting; her fluid transposition of literary motifs to an infinite number of keys; her amusing and mercifully indirect criticism of current literary theories; and her subtle questioning of the ways readers and writers shape, and are shaped by, literature.