'Burn what they should not see': family secrets in A S Byatt's Possession.

Huang, Yu-ting

Randolph Henry Ash in A S Byatt's Possession attempts to manipulate public memory of him by burning his personal writings. (1) Ash believes that by destroying historical evidence he is erasing all traces of his secret affair with Christabel LaMotte. His conduct raises questions regarding how people in the present approach the past: is language the only way to understand the past? Can people eliminate memories of certain events by destroying their historical records?

While narrative is often thought to be the most effective way to understand the past since language transmits meanings easily (although not always accurately), not all events are described and recorded. Most of the time, events are un/intentionally wiped out, disappearing either in history or the memories of later generations. Such effacing of the past does not suggest that these events are of no importance. A large number of them are significant enough to change the lives of those living in the present. These events disappear from narratives primarily because they conflict with collective concept of the past in the process of historical and memorial production. Critics, including Elizabeth Jelin and Michel-Rolph Trouillot, point out the inevitable silence in historical and memorial narratives. Luisa Passerini and Annette Kuhn argue that silence is by no means void and futile; instead, it has power to convey messages and to influence people's understanding of events in the past. Nevertheless, silence exerts its inf luence only when it is observed and narrated. Examining A S Byatt's Possession, this paper will explore the possible ways of interpreting silences in narratives. It will also analyse how the disclosure of secrets may influence the characters' understanding of the past as well as themselves. It will argue that the past does not merely show itself in narratives; more often than not, silence reveals another level of understanding the past which history has been unable to record.

In Silencing the Past, Michel-Rolph Trouillot argues that silences are produced in different stages of historical formation: 'Silence enters the process of historical production at four crucial moments: the moment of fact creation (the making of sources); the moment of fact assembly (the making of archives); the moment of fact retrieval (the making of narratives); and the moment of retrospective significance (the making of history in the final instance).' (2) Since each of these moments involves the removal of some events, the history we know is the articulation of what actually happened in the past.

Reading Possession through this lens, I would contend that silence occurs at 'the moment of fact creation'. The nineteenth-century characters prevent Ash's infidelity from historical sources in order to protect his reputation. With the gradual elimination of events, the present scholars' understanding of Ash and LaMotte is limited to the narratives that have been left behind. Such a situation is reflected at the very beginning of the novel, when Roland discovers Ash's letters to LaMotte. Byatt skilfully uses the scene to demonstrate the schism between what really happened and what scholars in the present believe may have taken place. Because of the Victorian memory bearers' determination to withhold their recollections from the sources of history, literary history is written based on a past with concealment.

These nineteenth-century memory bearers--the Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash, his wife Ellen Ash, Christabel LaMotte, and even LaMotte's best friend Blanche Glover--seek various ways to protect Ash and LaMotte's love affair. As a celebrated poet, Ash knows that after his death every piece of his writing may be closely examined. The risk thus lies in uncontrollable speculation, distortion and scandal. Lying on his deathbed, Ash asks Ellen to 'burn what [the public] should not see.' (3) Although Ash's wish can be attributed to his fear of misinterpretation, it can also be attributed to his anxiety regarding his posthumous reputation in the light of his adultery. Recognising the force of social judgment, Ash attempts to manipulate posterity by deciding what the public should and should not know. He believes that by confining knowledge of his love affair to the direct memory bearers, this memory can be buried with their deaths. Ash's wish to destroy his writing demonstrates his anxieties regarding posterity. In order to prevent the scandalous revelation of his infidelity, Ash decides to silence this episode of his life by destroying the documentation that surrounds it.

Like Ash, Ellen and LaMotte make efforts to hide this secret by avoiding any mention of their love affair. Because of the careful arrangement of their writing, when the twentieth-century scholar Beatrice Nest examines Ellen's journal, she misinterprets Ellen as a 'nice dull woman' at first sight. (4) Similarly, the feminist academics Leonora Stern and Maud Bailey examine LaMotte's work believing that she is a lesbian and interpreting her writing through this lens. Disappointed with LaMotte's adultery with Ash and her own financial failure, Blanche commits suicide. While she uses her death to avenge LaMotte's betrayal of their mutual ideal of being independent women, she also protects her best friend through dying, so that she can never expose LaMotte's secret to the public.

With the deliberate concealment of historical sources, the present understanding of both Ash and LaMotte is built upon a past with incomplete information. The secret could have been buried forever; nonetheless, the persistence of the young scholars Roland Michell and Maud Bailey discloses a buried past that has far-reaching consequences on their lives. Indeed, Roland and Maud are attracted to Ash and LaMotte's secret affair because of its great interest to them as researchers. However, pure academic curiosity is not sufficient to explain Roland's obsession with the letters and the mystery behind them. Ash's secret seems to possess magical power that appeals to him and even possesses him in the process of tracing the past. The connections between the two young scholars' unsatisfying present and the Victorian poets' secret may shed some light on their obsession with the past. I would contend that Byatt regards frustration with the present as an important trigger for turning the characters' attention to the past. Commenting on the social phenomenon of yearning for the past, David Lowenthal explains how it may serve as a shelter for people in the present. When the present is unsatisfying and the future perplexing, 'the past offers alternatives to an unacceptable present. In yesterday we find what we miss today.' (5) According to Lowenthal, the past offers a perfect escape from the present, since people do not take responsibility for previous generations. It offers a space for people to explore but without any real risks since we are looking at mistakes that have already been made. The letters from the Victorian poet open a door, allowing Roland and Maud to enter the past where they are able temporarily to off load their worries and problems.

When Roland discovers Ash's letters to an anonymous love and determines to dig out the story behind them, he is frustrated with his life in various ways. He is growing apart from his girlfriend Val because of their different personalities and because of financial pressures. Roland's failure to find a secure job in academe forces him to work as a poorly-paid part-time research assistant. Financially aided by Val, Roland is frustrated and anxious about his future. Mirroring Lowenthal's idea, John J Su regards Roland's insistence on tracking back as 'a deep need to escape unsatisfying social circumstances'. (6) Compared with Roland's failure in his career, Maud is successful as an academic. However, her success as a feminist scholar makes her sceptical about love. Stuck in an on/off relationship with the scholar Fergus Wolff, she refuses to admit to any emotional vulnerability. Maud's hiding of her pale gold hair, the symbol of her femininity, reveals her anxiety at showing her inner turmoil and affection, traits which conflict with her professional persona. (7) Seeking refuge from the present in academic curiosity, Roland and Maud explore the nineteenth century in quest of the relationship between LaMotte and Ash. In the process of searching through the buried past, their curiosity turns into an overwhelming, non-rational preoccupation which obsesses and possesses their minds, so much so that Roland says that he is 'possessive' about the poets' love affair and their letters. (8) This emotional involvement plays a key role in uncovering the past secret and connecting the present with the past.

In Family Secrets, Annette Kuhn underscores the importance of working closely with both fragmentary personal memories and gaps in the historical records in order to uncover what has been concealed, erased or forgotten. She compares family secrets with the scene of a crime, maintaining that traces are always left. Memory work then functions to make sense of fragmented historical clues: If the deed itself is irrecoverable, its traces may still remain. From these traces, markers that point toward a past presence, to something that has happened in this place, a (re)construction, if not a simulacrum, of the event can be pieced together. Memory Work has a great deal in common with forms of inquiry which [...] involve working backwards--searching for clues, deciphering signs and traces, making deductions, patching together reconstructions out of fragments of evidence. (9)

Kuhn proposes that historical narratives are by no means the only way to approach the past. The interactions and interconnections of private memories and broader public contexts make tracing back possible. While memory changes and fades, history (or collective memories in Kuhn's terms) offers something more definite, formulaic and unchanging. The interactions of the different features of memory and history enable us to reconstruct the missing past.

However, in the case of secrets and the silence of previous generations, memories are not always obtainable or, indeed, reliable, particularly when the direct memory bearers are determined to bury these memories with their deaths. Historical narratives, for most people, offer a comparatively approachable framework of the past. Despite the fact that, as Trouillot suggests, tracing the missing past through historical materials may leave out a great portion of the past, it is still undeniable that while traces of memory are lost, history which involves in language and narrative 'speaks' for at least part of the past. This perspective helps explain why Roland and Maud dig into Ash and LaMotte's letters and poems, along with Ellen's diaries, trying to trace the connections in the two poets' lives. In uncovering secrets of the past, archives work as major sources for Roland and Maud.

Although historical materials often function as the most effective way to understand the past, conflicting interpretations of these materials can lead to contrary accounts. Relying on history to approach the past, one may risk being misled by narratives shaped by the collective framework. At the beginning of the novel Roland and Maud are led astray by their scholarly knowledge of Ash and LaMotte, which is developed upon several decades of research by a number of prominent scholars. Roland and Maud's longstanding devotion to the poets' work and the critical lens through which it has been interpreted has numbed their more basic, emotional responses. When historical materials and academic research are their only source, language and narratives shape their understanding of the past. While they believe that they thoroughly understand the Victorian poets, they are in fact entrapped by theoretical criticism--as Maud is a feminist scholar and Roland a 'new critical close-reader'. (10) Unable to hear through the silences, they are manipulated by the words and omissions of the Victorian memory bearers. The image of the past is thus developed upon what is said and concealed. Language, here, does not disclose secrets; on the contrary, it becomes an obstacle to unearthing the past. Roland is shocked by the manipulative efforts of the Victorians when he discovers Ash's unfinished letter to LaMotte. Having devoted himself to Ash's work, Roland 'thought he knew Ash fairly well, as well as anyone might know a man whose life seemed to be all in his mind.' (11) The contents of the letter, however, are totally beyond Roland's understanding of the poet. In one respect Ash's unfinished letters support Kuhn's belief that what has been done always leaves traces. It could also be argued that the language in the letter provokes Roland's imagination. It is this emotional understanding that turns out to be the key to understanding Ash's secret life. What is revealed in the letter is as crucial as that which is concealed. Because of the letters, Roland starts to learn to look at the past, probing both narrative and silence.

In the process of tracing Ash's secret, Ellen Ash's diary functions as the key to solving the mystery of the unfinished letter and to disclosing the affair, but paradoxically its revelations come through silences. For years the significance of the journal has been underestimated as its contents have been read far too literally. Beatrice Nest, an Ellen Ash scholar, is the first person to feel the unspeakable silence in Ellen's journal. Spending decades reading and re-reading her journal, Beatrice feels Ellen's intention to show her despair in her habit of deliberate omission. Beatrice suggests that Ellen 'baffles' readers in order to 'say' something subtle and delicate. (12) Beatrice's emotional ability to read this absence in narratives, however, impedes her career as an academic. She says, 'We were not taught to do scholarship by studying primarily what was omitted.' (13) While other scholars, including Roland, Maud, Cropper, Blackadder and Leonora, rely on the manifest content and theoretical principles to interpret the poets, Beatrice alone observes Ellen's latent content--the power of silence and omission which lies beyond narratives. Elizabeth Jelin's idea of the existence of absence can further clarify Beatrice's responses to Ellen's diary. When examining traumatic experience, Jelin emphasises the role of oblivion in memories. She asserts that 'oblivion is not an expression of absence or emptiness. Rather, it is the presence of that absence, the representation of something that is no longer there, that has been erased, silenced, or denied' [my emphasis]. (14) Her argument underscores the existence of absence rather than its void. Oblivion does not result in the disappearance of events; on the contrary, absence becomes the way in which an event shows itself. Drawing upon Jelin's ideas, I would contend that Ash's secret takes the form of silence to keep itself alive. In Ellen's diary, silence is a state of existence through which the hidden event shows itself. Only when we recognise the presence of this silence in narratives can the secret be disclosed. Even if Beatrice does not recognise Ash's relationship with LaMotte, her observation of silence leads her to transcend language as well as theoretical limitations.

In examining female diaries, Adrienne Shiffman maintains: 'Any diarist who does not personally destroy her work must be aware of the existence of a possible audience, present or future, and will construct her text accordingly.' (15) Ellen's manipulation of language and silence can be exemplified by her intentional disclosure of the letters sent to her by Blanche Glover, but she deliberately omits her visitor's name and 'the matter' they talk about. (16) She carefully arranges what to say and what to leave blank, so that the presence of silence may be observed by a future reader, however subtle it is. On the surface, Ellen presents herself as a traditional woman 'entirely subservient to the dominance of her husband', but her 'autonomous self' is revealed in the omission. (17) Ellen creates the presence of absence in order to reveal her pain and helplessness to readers who feel the silence. However, in the process of reconstructing the past these silences are easily neglected, and the events disappear from history as well as memory.

The recognition of deliberate, considered silence may contribute to decentralising the position of historical narratives in reconstituting the past. Nevertheless, such recognition does not automatically bring meanings to silence. Silence needs to be deciphered and explained to make it meaningful. In the process of tracing secrets, existing historical narratives may provide clues toward understanding the past; imagination and interpretation of silence further bridge the gap between what is said and what remains unsaid. As Luisa Passerini indicates: 'When trying to understand connections between silence and speech, oblivion and memory, we must look for relationships between traces, or between traces and their absences.' (18) Passerini's idea of linking narrative to silence mirrors Kuhn's conception of memory work which employs feelings and imagination to piece together the fragmented historical evidences. It is because of memory work that the past is understood through a network of reason and emotion, history and memory, the collective and the individual.

To explain Roland and Maud's transformation during their quest from the perspective of Kuhn's memory work, the two young scholars are unable to understand the clues of the Victorian poets' love in their poetry until they let go of their rational knowledge and begin to imagine the poets' feelings. Maud says: 'We never say the word Love, do we--we know it's a suspect ideological construct--especially Romantic Love--so we have to make a real effort of imagination to know what it felt like to be them, here, believing in these things--Love--themselves--that what they did mattered.' (19) Memory work helps Roland and Maud to reach another level of understanding that is not confined to linguistic and literary-theoretical analysis. Rather, the past--combining their feelings, imagination and emotion--becomes part of their lives and experience. The history of the Victorian poets, therefore, extends to the present as it becomes part of the scholars' memories.

The practice of memory work does not simply contribute to interpreting silence within narratives. More significantly, by applying one's experience and imagination to silence, the distance between the past and the present is shortened. John J Su explains how imagination may link the past and the present in Possession. He writes: 'Possession, in my reading, suggests that if imaginative role-playing or "(re)collection" fails to recover the past transparently, it creates new associations, memories, and resonances that can modify how individuals perceive their own world.' (20) As with Kuhn, Su's argument recognises the value of historical materials and imagination, both of which are equally important to bringing about a new relationship between the past and the present. Such a relationship leans more on the present imagination and interpretation of the past than on facts. Indeed, Byatt develops this novel upon the theme of historical tracing back, yet she reveals that the present-day characters rely on their interpretations to understand the past. To be more specific, what matters most in this novel is not a monolithic version of the past, but rather the forming of a new relationship between the present and the past in the process of piecing together the known and unknown, the narrated and the silenced. This is what Fredric Jameson dislikes about postmodern novels. Writing on E L Doctorow's novel Ragtime, Jameson remarks, 'This historical novel can no longer set out to represent the historical past; it can only "represent" our ideas and stereotypes about the past.' (21) Dana Shiller further elaborates Jameson's ideas, noting that 'the postmodern preoccupation with history-as-text has shifted attention from the actual events of the past, toward the interpretations of those events.' (22) Jameson's perspective reflects traditional historians' insistence on being objective and on presenting facts, yet it places limitations on the past. Even though it is undeniable that Possession focuses on the more postmodern interpretative past rather than on the actual past, I would take issue with Jameson to propose that his insistence on seeking only hard facts relating to the past restricts our understanding of it. Although Byatt begins her novel with the characters' scholarly search for the reality of the silent past, through the process of material collecting and memory work Possession concludes that it is impossible to find an actual, single past.

Even though the novel closes with the twentieth-century characters having reached a better understanding of historical facts, Byatt demonstrates that it is impossible to reproduce a precise version of the past. Byatt employs an omniscient narrator to show a gap between her characters' understanding of the past through a combination of historical materials and her readers' knowledge of the nineteenth century. In most parts of the novel Roland and Maud's interpretation of the past closely matches the omniscient narration, except for certain omissions which can be best exemplified by Ash's encounter with Maia, his illegitimate daughter. Byatt in her epilogue expresses doubts on the absolute reality of the retrieved past. By disclosing the chance encounter between Ash and Maia, the narrator tells us, 'there are things that happen and leave no discernible trace, are not spoken or written of.' (23) Because of such historical omissions, of which no traces can be observed, the lock of golden hair that Ellen puts in the little box buried with Ash is misinterpreted as LaMotte's hair. This historical episode is not recognised by the twentieth-century scholars, even at the end of the novel, but it is revealed to readers. To a certain degree, Byatt still shows her trust in historical framework, regarding archives as vital and useful sources of understanding the past. Nevertheless, no matter how closely one might reproduce the past, in Possession she suggests that absences and silences can never be totally uncovered and decoded, and as a result there is always scope for misinterpretation.

Taking both narratives and silence into consideration and seeking memory work to reconstruct the past, Byatt shifts her emphasis from the past to the present. Roland and Maud gradually become the focus of the novel. Rather than emphasising the Victorian plot, Byatt shows more interest in how Roland and Maud reinterpret history and how they deal with their discovery of the secret. I believe that Byatt raises the issue of secrecy and absence not merely to demonstrate that the past is irretrievable. More importantly, she shows how the process of tracing back provides new meanings for the present characters and establishes new relationships between the past and the present. Such newly-built relationships give the past a new life and enable it to live on, rather than dying at the moment when events and memory bearers cease to be. Historical narratives, silence and memory interact with one another to build up a new relationship between the past and the present. With all the research and historical tracking, Roland and Maud become so possessive about the past that they merge into the consciousness and memories of the two poets. Byatt even makes the present and the past so parallel that sometimes readers are unable to identify which couple is being described. At the beginning of Chapter Fifteen, Byatt uses 'the man and the woman' to describe Ash and LaMotte when they wait at the railway station. (24) The characters' identities turn vague because of the unspecific pronouns. No matter how brief the confusion before readers realise who Byatt is describing, she has successfully revealed the connections and overlaps between the Victorian lovers and the contemporary scholars. By continuing the memories of Ash and LaMotte in Roland and Maud, love in the Victorian age finds a new expression in the postmodern world.

The recognition of silence and absence of the past allows Roland and Maud to use their experiences, feelings and imagination to arrive at interpretations and to project themselves into the past. As I have noted earlier, the relationship between the present and the past enables history to stay alive in the present. It also enables the scholars to understand their feelings for one another. In a kind of mise-en-abyme effect, the past affects the present, and simultaneously the interpretations of the present shape the face of the past. It is because of the present characters' ability to observe silence and absence in historical narratives that they free themselves from the control of history and theory narratives, and they are able to interpret the past through their memory work. Meanings of past events, therefore, are not consigned to the past, but rather they grow and interact with the present, enabling the characters to develop new lives and to redefine new selves who engage with what has gone before.

Del Ivan Janik has asserted that in Possession the love of the Victorian poets 'leads the scholars to gradually open themselves to new emotional possibilities.' (25) In tracing Ash and LaMotte's affair, Maud and Roland free themselves step by step from the relentless scholarly quest to learn to use their feelings and imaginations to experience the passion of the Victorian lovers. As they immerse themselves more deeply in the Victorians' secret romance, what they discover, paradoxically, are their own buried desires and feelings: they feel the poets' love, they feel their similar desire for 'an empty bed in an empty room', and they feel each other. (26) Realising that she is the direct descendant of Ash and LaMotte, Maud discovers the presence of LaMotte inside herself. She says: 'I feel as she did. I keep my defences up because I must go on doing my work. I know how she felt about her unbroken egg. Her self-possession, her autonomy. I don't want to think of that going' (Byatt's italics). (27) The Victorian romance turns into actual memories and a rediscovery of heritage. While her academic identity as a feminist prevents her from the most intuitive desire of love, tracing LaMotte's romance enables Maud to re-examine her academic knowledge as well as her life. Maud learns from her ancestor and decides not to follow LaMotte's lonely road of refusing love and insisting on autonomy. Maud unties her head-square so as to let loose her pale gold hair, an action which strongly symbolises her courage to face past pain, femininity and sexuality, the part of her that she has intended to hide from people as well as from herself. Having let loose her hair, Maud sees 'scarlet blood', but she also opens herself to the possibility of love. (28) It is noticeable that Maud's transformation is not inspired merely by the acknowledgement of LaMotte's love story, but rather she summons the courage to face her frailty when she sees herself in LaMotte. The past for her is no longer a matter of mere history. With memory work, her emotions participate in that past. And it gains new meanings and grows a new life in Maud's life and memory.

As with Maud's reconfiguration of herself, Roland's transformation lies in his attitudes toward his life and surroundings. Tracing the missing past, Roland turns from a pessimistic acceptance of his failure to overcome his limitations, which is demonstrated particularly in his love for Maud. His hesitation in expressing his feelings to Maud primarily results from his inferiority complex and their incompatible social classes: 'in some dark and outdated English social system of class, which he did not believe in, but felt obscurely working and gripping him, Maud was County, and he was urban lower-middle-class.' (29) Class, for Roland, is a conservative but undeniable power which governs his relationship with Maud. His sense of inferiority discourages him from expressing love. Nevertheless, projecting himself into the romance of the Victorian lovers who eventually succumbed to the social standards of morality and fidelity Roland finds an alternative solution to his own conflict between inner feelings and external limitations. As Su indicates, 'it is their knowledge of the outcomes of Ash's and LaMotte's decisions that enables Roland and Maud to clarify their own choices and ultimately to diverge from the poets' romantic plot.' (30) The break-up of Ash and LaMotte inspires the young lovers to continue their romance despite the many forms of distance between them--social, cultural and geographical.

At the end of the novel Byatt does not especially emphasise the academic breakthrough in uncovering the poets' secret but rather Roland's and Maud's reconfiguration of their own lives. These young scholars benefit from the quest academically and personally. Because of their new understanding of the past, they find their future. Byatt writes: 'In the morning, the whole world had a strange new smell ... It was the smell of death and destruction and it smelled fresh and lively and hopeful.' (31) The disclosure of a secret Victorian affair marks the new beginning of Roland's and Maud's lives, which is stimulated by their experience of and immersion in the past.

Janik analyses the recent spate of historical novels, asserting: 'Their [characters'] pursuit of meaning almost always leads them to the realization that historical truth is hopelessly elusive, yet the very process of historical exploration leads to a confrontation with inner reality that may be painful but can be liberating and transforming.' (32) In tracing secrets of the past, it is not facts that become meaningful to us. The process of imagining, interpreting and reconstructing turns history into memory and connects the present to the past. Even though in traditional historians' eyes new interpretations of the past are inevitably subjective and fail to recover an absolute past, Possession underscores the role of silences in historical narratives. Through the perception and reinterpretation of silence, the past is given new meanings aside from pre-existing historical narratives. Taking narratives and silence into consideration, Roland and Maud are able to reinvent a past by means of their memory work and imagination, setting the past free from the complete control of hegemonic narratives. The novel does not ultimately unravel the 'absolute facts' behind the secrets to the modern characters, and thus in a sense Roland and Maud do not successfully solve the mystery of Ash's love affair. Nonetheless, Byatt provides a solution to contemporary anxieties about the detachment of the past from the present. The association of family secrets, historical traces and memory work offers opportunities for the characters to understand their heritage and to seek new directions for their lives.

Yu-ting Huang

School of Culture and Communication

[English Literary Studies]

ENDNOTES

(1) A S Byatt, Possession, Vintage, New York, 1990.

(2) Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past, Beacon Press, Boston, 1995, 26.

(3) Byatt, 480.

(4) Byatt, 240.

(5) David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country, CUP, Cambridge, 1985, 49.

(6) John J Su, 'Fantasies of (re)collection: Collecting and imagination in A S Byatt's Possession: A Romance', Contemporary Literature, vol. 45, no. 4, 2004, 684-712, 689.

(7) Byatt, 295.

(8) Byatt, 101.

(9) Annette Kuhn, Family Secrets: Arts of Memory and Imagination, Verso, London, 2002, 4.

(10) Keen, Suzanne. Romances of the Archive in Contemporary British Fiction, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 2001, 57.

(11) Byatt, 10.

(12) Byatt, 239.

(13) Byatt, 241.

(14) Jelin, 17.

(15) Adrienne Shiffman, '"Burn what they should not see": The private journal as public text in A S Byatt's Possession', Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, vol. 20, no. 1, 2001, 93-106, 95.

(16) Byatt, 251.

(17) Shiffman, 100.

(18) Luisa Passerini, 'Memories between silence and oblivion', in Katherine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone (eds), Contested Pasts: The Politics of Memory, Routledge, London, 2003, 238-253, 240.

(19) Byatt, 290.

(20) Su, 687.

(21) Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Duke University Press, Durham, 1991, 25.

(22) Dana Shiller, 'The redemptive past in the neo-Victorian novel', Studies in the Novel vol. 29, no. 4, 1997, 538-560, 539.

(23) Byatt, 552.

(24) Byatt, 297-98.

(25) Del Ivan Janik, 'No end of history: Evidence from the contemporary English novel', Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 41, no. 2, 1995, 160-189, 165.

(26) Byatt, 290-1.

(27) Byatt, 549.

(28) Byatt, 296.

(29) Byatt, 459.

(30) Su, 706.

(31) Byatt, 551.

(32) Janik, 188.