The appeal of A.S. Byatt's Booker Prize-winning Possession was--for many people I know--the way Byatt tapped into a fantasy many literary critics and lovers of literary history share. That fantasy grows out of the difficulty of finding truly original things to say about classic works of literature combined with the pressure one is under, in an academic setting, to publish self-professed pathbreaking research at breakneck speed. Literary theory exists in no small part to enable careerist critics to continue to find things to say about writers and works that have already had hundreds, even thousands, of articles and books published about them.

It is the very rare, and very lucky, student of literary history who actually does turn up something genuinely new to say about famous writers who have been endlessly and exhaustively trawled by countless others. But it is not at all rare to dream about being one of those lucky few, and this is what Byatt understood when she wrote her bestselling novel about two academics, one a struggling white male grad student who studies a white male poet and thus hasn't a hope in hell of getting a job in the trendy academic marketplace, the other a hipper than thou feminist theorist who has made her name bashing men in the approved poststructuralist style but is feeling a little tapped out and a little like it's all a big charade starring her precious famous self. Possession centers around the story of how these two unlikely individuals uncover a hidden piece of literary history.

The novel is, in a way, an extended academic chase scene in which this mismatched pair works together to show how two Victorian poets who had been regarded as entirely unconnected to one another were in fact deeply involved with one another, intellectually and sexually. Of course the mismatched pair falls in love. But that's not the hook. The hook is that they actually found something other people had not found out already. They actually came up with something new to say that was actually worth saying. The romance of Possession is the idea that every now and then, someone in an English department actually manages to do some real scholarship. The fantasy of it, for the frustrated academically-inclined reader, is that someday, what happens in the book could also happen to the reader.

And, every now and then, it does. Today's New York Times carries the story of how author Paul Auster rediscovered, edited, and published a forgotten and strikingly revealing story by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Known for the puritanically stiff prose of The Scarlet Letter and other works, Hawthorne has been remembered as one of the grimmer, more tightly-buttoned figures in American literary history. To many, he is a bit like medicine: you read him because he is assigned in school and you know it's good for you, but you don't enjoy the experience much at all and you are quite glad when it's over. The story Auster has unearthed shows another side of Hawthorne. Entitled "Twenty Days With Julian & Little Bunny by Papa," it tells the story of the weeks Hawthorne and his young son once spent together when his wife and daughters were away. It was not written for publication, but for a much-loved private audience of family. It's a charming find, and an exciting one. Read the article, and then consider revisiting your Hawthorne.