Possession

Roland Michell finds two unsent letters in a library copy of a Victorian poet’s book and, with a Byatt scholar named Maud Bailey, begins tracing an affair that the whole academic establishment has missed. Byatt writes the nineteenth-century poems, letters and journals herself, at full length, so the discovery is real for the reader too. It is a campus satire, a detective story and a romance, and it won the Booker Prize in 1990.