Perhaps I'm wrong. I have loved Jane Austen since I was twenty and each rereading is different as my life experience broadens. What once seemed frothily hilarious is now embued with subtler subtext and meaning. It's something like reading a piano score versus reading a symphonic score. So perhaps I would have simply liked the twining love stories at first and found the rest of it with rereading over the years.

I love finding the right author or the right book at the right time. I rely on certain books to sustain me, comfort me, awe me. It makes me sad when I realize that I've used up all an author had to say to me, not because that author is not as good as I once thought but rather I've absorbed as much as I can from the particular story and it no longer has relevance to who I am or what I need from their art. It doesn't happen very often. I tend to be devoted for life. It does happen, though. I no longer worship at the altar of Charlotte Bronte, a particular favorite of mine from my teenage years throughout my turbulent twenties and early thirties.

So I'm grateful to find Byatt now when I need someone to walk with me through my current path. My emotional landscape is less tumultuous, my philosophies fully formed. If my choices seem narrower it's only because I'm no longer tormented by endless options. The obscuring dirt has been sifted out leaving behind precious artifacts to puzzle over and treasure and place in context with deep contentment at knowing how to do it and why it matters. She is brilliant at articulating this self-awareness and the accompanying unsentimental acceptance of the trade-off between youth and wisdom.

The book itself sometimes annoys me because it's focused on fictional Victorian poets. I have no taste for mid and late 19th century fiction and poetry, none at all. The language is dense and fussy, using ten words where one would do. I have never been able to like anything of George Eliot's, for instance, or Charles Dickens'. It's rather surprising I took to the Brontes, but it was their lives that touched me as much as their fiction. In general the Victorian authors strike me as dreadfully earnest and diligent, intensely engaged in the mundane and physical. It's difficult for me to spend time among them, even among fictional creations like Randolph Ash and Cristabel LaMotte. Something in me shies violently from a period which is so stiflingly rigid yet paradoxically keen on expansion with a strong prediliction for sentimentality.

It is no doubt a fault in me that I cannot value this period as it deserves. So be it.

The aspect of Possession I am having the most trouble with, though, is not the Victorian miasma but the far more unhealthy reality of academia. It's no real surprise given my current struggles with college administrators and arbitrary rules that I don't much feel like hearing about the troubles of graduate students and professors struggling to make a difference in their fields, reconciling knowledge for knowledge's sake with commerce, competition, and hierarchy among their peers. I'm jealous and sickened at the same time.

But this is also why I like the book. It is useful to be reminded that what Maud and Roland go through is what it means to be an academic. I like it because it is a tremendous, skillful novel and I find it inspiring as a writer. I don't know what anyone else thinks of this book but clearly I'm a latecomer to the Byatt Appreciation Society based on the encomiums printed as blurbs on the back cover. That's fine. I don't want to analyze anything of hers yet. I am content to have her company on my journey.

I highly recommend this author to you, whatever your age.

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