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. (read more)