Chapter 1 Summary

Possession: A Romance is a novel about a love affair between two Victorian poets, Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte, in the late 1800s. It is also a mystery about how two scholars in 1987, Maud Bailey and Roland Michell, discover the truth about what happened between the poets. Before the book begins, the author provides a couple of quotes by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Robert Browning to set the stage. The quotes talk about romance as a combination of total lies and fabrication, making it clear to the reader that most everything that follows is fiction.

On a September morning in 1986, Roland Michell is in the Reading Room of the London Library. He is studying the famous Victorian poet, Randolph Henry Ash. Roland is looking through Ash's own dilapidated copy of Principi di una Scienza by Vico, and Ash's notes are scattered throughout the...