Eleanor’s Reviews > Possession > Status Update

‘He had time to feel the strangeness of before and after; an hour ago there had been no poems, and now they came like rain and were real.’

Correction - this chapter where Roland returns to his apartment, and finally feels that life can inhere in writing, after so many years of analyzing, of focusing on absences and gaps, and is rewarded by a sudden influx of poetry, is now my favorite

‘Tell me, then, what do you write? For I suppose you do write? It is a metier where the desire without the act is a destructive phantom.’

Imagery of closure - glass coffins, eggshell, underwater, linked to B and C’s female seclusion, but also to male seclusion at times, offset by lovers uniting
Letters were convincing, in some places I miss the fresh modern prose, like EA’s journal
Moving to a climactic revelation, sense of the wolf stalking. Is the party responsible for Bertha and Blanche the same? That it could be RHA I think is a red herring

‘He had a habit which Maud was not experienced enough to recognise as a common one in ex-lovers of giving little tugs at the carefully severed spider-threads or puppet-strings which had once tied her to him.’

Edenic imagery shifts into Grimm fairy tale - in line with in Christabel’s Tales - enjoyed how the Glass Coffin fairytale mirrors Roland’s experience with the Seal Court house (performs good deed, allowed into house, given ‘quest’ of finding a Princess)
Enjoying the clash of feminist and classic criticism, the anxiety of a male invader on both sides/timelines
Paper-hunting passage is romantic+ideal

Great - jealous of her ability to craft a convincing myth/history of a poet, whose work is in turn obsessed with the creation of myths/histories
Garden of Hesperides/Edenic imagery is working well
Roland’s excitement at finding something new and important is relatable/something I aspire to - but its contrast with the mundane depression of the rest of his academic and personal life is scarily rendered - a fear