Taking up Maude’s invitation to visit LaMotte’s grave, they have a chance encounter with Joan and George Bailey, an elderly couple related to LaMotte who still live in the same estate where LaMotte once lived. Everything she wasn’t.’īut she admits that what Roland has found is intriguing and encourages him to pursue it further. That nasty anti-feminist poem about the medium, what was it, Mummy Possest? All that ponderous obfuscation. I wouldn’t have thought his poems would appeal to her. Committed to the feminist interpretation of these writers, Bailey strongly doubts LaMotte and Ash would have had much in common. Roland travels to see Dr Maude Bailey, an expert on LaMotte and a distant relative hers, but she is very incredulous towards his theory. Roland is also reminded of the disdain such feminist academics have for Ash, some of whom speculate that credit for his work actually belongs to his wife Ellen. Asking around, Roland learns that LaMotte has a following among feminist scholars who admire her epic and have their own interpretations of it. Roland soon identifies a potential suspect for who the letters were addressed to – a Miss Christabel LaMotte a writer of poems with religious themes, children’s books and a certain ‘unreadable’ epic called The Fairy Melusina. Shocked and excited by the discovery, Roland does something out of character himself and steals the letters. Their content seems far out of character from what Roland knows about Ash. But turning over the pages of the book Roland discovers two draft letters by Ash to an unnamed woman. The book had once been owned by Ash and Roland is hoping to find sources for one of Ash’s poems. One September day in 1986, 29 year old Roland goes to the London Library to find a copy of Principi di Scienza Nuova by the Italian philosophy Vico.
Cropper is also a trustee for the trust that funds the department where Roland works under Professor Blackadder. A further major hinderance to his career is the fact that despite being an English poet, the largest collection of Ash’s work is held by Dale Owen University in New Mexico, whose Professor, Mortimer Cropper, is the world’s leading authority on Ash. Despite his extensive education, a career as an expert in an obscure Victorian poet is far from lucrative and Roland works as a dishwasher when he isn’t researching or tutoring and is otherwise financially reliant on his girlfriend, Val, as he has been for years while he earned his post-graduate diplomas. Roland Michel is an underemployed academic whose specialty is the work of a Victorian poet named Randolf Henry Ash. It is a highly complex and considered novel that combines mystery, conflict, romance and tragedy with more than a whiff of satire and self-awareness. AS Byatt’s Possession won the prestigious Booker Prize in 1990.
0 kommentar(er)
