A.S. Byatt has written numerous novels, short story collections, and nonfiction works. These include novels The Shadow of the Sun (1964), The Virgin in the Garden (1978), The Biographers Tale (2000), and The Children's Book (2009); short story collections The Matisse Stories (1993) and The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye (1994); and nonfiction works Degrees of Freedom: The Early Novels of Iris Murdoch (1965) and Unruly Times: Wordsworth and Coleridge (1989). She has also edited scholarly volumes on Wordsworth, Coleridge, and George Eliot.
Possession has been called a "romance of the archives" novel, putting it into a loose category with P.D. James's Original Sin (1994) and Umberto...