Browning's poem 'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came' is one possible source for Byatt's wandering academic in the wilderness, who also stumbles across his destination quite by accident. In contrast to Ellen Ash's dismissal of her maidservant, the Brownings made financial arrangements for the mother and child. Ellen Ash's dilemma of how to deal with a pregnant maid is also in part biographical borrowing. The are one obvious source for the correspondence between Ash and LaMotte. Sometimes these are present at the level of plot and character. Ash and Browning show similar interests in spiritualism, the social conditions of the period, the religious and cultural consequences of Darwin's Theory of Evolution, changing attitudes towards the Bible, and love in the modern age.Įchoes of Browning's poetry and life are ample in Possession. Ash shares with Browning a preference for the, which Byatt draws on in poems such as 'Swammerdam' and 'Mummy Possest'. He is often identified as the model for Randolph Henry Ash. Robert Browning (1812-1889) was an accomplished poet and critic, married to the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
Readers of the novel don't necessarily need this knowledge, but those who have it can appreciate some of the more subtle features of Byatt's work. Here undergraduate Laura Kilbride outlines some of the ways in which Possession touches on the work of real, as well as fictional, Victorian poets.
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