One of her daughters, Dorothy, doesn't actually like 'her' story. The stories are modelled on them (Olive feels free to raid the book for material to be worked up and published) rather than created for their pleasure.

Each book explores a different vein of fantasy – Tom's involves his search in the underworld for his shadow, stolen from him in his cradle. She would make up tales for Tom, her first born, about inch-high warriors marching over the counterpane, but later she got into the habit of writing stories down in a special book for each child. An author of children's stories who is also a mother is someone who shuts herself away from her own children in order to weave spells for other ones.ĭo Olive's stories start as stories for her children? Not really. If Byatt is a novelist of ideas, then they are often overlapping and contradictory ideas, lumped together rather than dramatised in isolation. Art, politics and sex – most writers would consider that enough to be getting on with, but Byatt adds class by making Olive a runaway from a deprived childhood in the north. There's a flow of characters between the groups, so that, for instance, a boy found hiding in the Kensington Museum is taken in by Olive but then moves in with Fludd as his apprentice.īenedict Fludd may owe something to Eric Gill Olive Wellwood certainly owes much to E Nesbit, not just the writing but the Fabian viewpoint and the unorthodox married life. Benedict Fludd, a brilliant but unstable potter, is the head of another household within visiting distance. At the centre of one family group is Olive Wellwood, a successful children's writer.

Byatt is an admirer of Iris Murdoch's fiction and has taken on a version of the typical Murdoch double plot.

Possession as byatt review