The recap
Roland Michell, a junior researcher in London, is working in the London Library when he discovers handwritten drafts of a letter by the eminent Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash, tucked inside a book that once belonged to him. The drafts hint that the apparently devoted husband had a romance no biographer has ever suspected. Roland quietly takes the pages, and the trail soon leads him to Maud Bailey, a guarded, brilliant scholar of the little-known poet Christabel LaMotte, who is also her distant relative. Together, and despite their wariness of each other, they follow a path of letters, journals and poems, while rival academics close in on the same discovery. Byatt braids two love stories, one Victorian and one modern, and invents an entire literary archive to hold them, including convincing verse by both poets. The result is part detective story, part academic satire and part grand romance, a novel about the hunger to know the dead and the risk of being known.
Why read it
For readers who love letters, libraries and literary mysteries, and for anyone who wants a romance that is also a treasure hunt through the past.
Fun facts
- 01
It won the 1990 Booker Prize for Fiction, and the Irish Times International Fiction Prize the same year.
- 02
Byatt wrote all of the poetry attributed to her invented Victorian poets, a virtuoso pastiche of Victorian verse woven through the novel.
- 03
The novel was adapted as a feature film of the same name in 2002.
