Autograph letter signed : Avèze, France to Adeline Tintner, 1991 August 6.

Byatt presents an erudite explanation of how authors such as Henry James, Robert Browning, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Thomas Mann, Honore de Balzac, and Marguerite Young have influenced her work, in particular her Booker prize-winning novel "Possession," published in 1990, and her short stories. Byatt cites several examples of fiction and poetry by these authors to illustrate her point, with quotations from Mann and others. She explains that the character [Randolph] Ash "is my fiction & my 'quotations' are a kind of game with modern theories of Intertextuality." She notes that David Lodge thinks "Possession" is "funny (in its taking apart of modern critical theory)." Also records that "The Hawthorne epigraph is something I've been teaching & meditating for years . . . I first met the paragraph when I was a postgraduate at Bryn Mawr in 1957. That was also where I discovered Marguerite Young's "Angel in the Forest" which has had a curious effect on all my work." States that "Possession is about 'greedy reading' & so is my writing -- a kind of writerly raid on scholarly dogmatics & theories."