Byatt describes her novel as a romance. It won the Booker Prize in 1990. It is about literature, poetry, myth, love, betrayal, longing, penitence, and devotion. The plot jumps between the academic milieu of England in the 1980s and the literary scene of London in the 19th century. Many of the chapters are simply poems, diary entries, or travelogues. At the heart of the story are two 19th century British poets: one an obscure lady, Christabel LaMotte, whose family originally hailed from Brittany and who was only recognized by twentieth century scholars of feminism and lesbianism for her epic poem, Melusina, and one a famous man, Randolph Henry Ash, whose volumes of poetry made him famous in his day and later stood the test of time, “Ash liked his characters at or over the edge of madness, constructing systems of belief and survival from the fragments of experience available to them.”
It was discovered by Roland Michell, a toiling post-doc in 1980s London, that Ash, though married to his wife Ellen for over forty years, had a secret epistolary correspondence with LaMotte. This discovery threatened to upend what modern scholarship thought of both poets. “The truth is—my dear Miss LaMotte—that we live in an old world—a tired world—a world that has gone on piling up speculation and observations until truths that might have been graspable in the bright Dayspring of human morning—by the young Plotinus or the ecstatic John on Patmos—are now obscured by palimpsest on palimpsest, by thick horny growths over that clear vision.”
In an other letter, Ash writes to LaMotte of poetry, “You know how it is, being yourself a poet—one writes such and such a narrative, and thinks as one goes along—here’s a good touch—this concept modifies that—will it not be too obvious to the generality?—too thick an impasto of the Obvious—one has almost a disgust at the too-apparent meaning—and then the general public gets hold of it, and pronounces it at the same time too heartily simple and too loftily incomprehensible—and it is clear only that whatever one had hoped to convey is lost in mists of impenetrability—and slowly it loses its life—in one’s own mind, as much as in its readers…. The only life I am sure of is the life of the Imagination…. When I write I know. Remember that miraculous saying of the boy Keats—I am certain of nothing, but the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination—Now I am not saying—Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty, or any such quibble. I am saying that without the Maker’s imagination nothing can live for us.”
In the course of the novel, Christabel LaMotte finds herself at the home of an aristocratic cousin and his lone daughter, Sabine de Kercoz, in the family’s ancestral home in Brittany. Sabine’s diary reveals, “I sat by her side and whispered to her that I had hopes of being a poet. She said, ‘It is not the way to happiness, ma fille.’ I said on the contrary, it was only when writing that I felt wholly living. She said, ‘If that is so, fortunately or unfortunately, nothing I can say will dissuade you.’” In another diary entry, Sabine writes, “She talked of Melusina and the nature of epic. She wants to write a Fairy Epic, she says, not grounded in historical truth, but in poetic and imaginative truth…. She says Romance is a land where women can be free to express their true natures, as in the Ile de Sein or Sid, though not in this world. She said, in Romance, women’s two natures can be reconciled. I asked, which two natures, and she said, men saw women as double beings, enchantresses and demons or innocent angels.”
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