There weren't any surprises, wch I found disappointing. The parallels between the 19th c. family and novel and the 21st c. family and letters were too smooth, even though the modern half seems to be trying to persuade us that there aren't any real villains any more, or even real errors. By the standards of 19th c. fiction, even in the smoothed-out prose given here, the modern story is too easy to be interesting or even credible. I can, from the view of Byron here used, just imagine that he was working away from the Aberdonian concept of Christian sin, but I cannot imagine that he would have abandoned the idea of sins against, say, personal ideals, or Romantic truths.
The only open question at the end of both novels is whether the internal one, accepted as a nearly-lost work of George, Lord , was a forgery, and if so was it forged by his daughter ? Which is plausible; she certainly needed to "forge the uncreated conscience of h[er] race". But as far as I'm concerned Crowley only sets up the problem, he doesn't work through cases for the possible answers, or what they would imply.
The unavoidable comparison is to 's Possession, which sets more puzzles. (Well, perhaps the Vigenere cipher and the email correspondence are meant to be taken as puzzles, although we aren't given enough of the first to chew on, and the second ought to be quotidian by now. They may be symbols, but as dry bones only which do not live.) Byatt answers more of the 19th c. puzzles, and sets up a happy ending suitable for a comedy, so it has taken me some thought to decide why I thought her book was more rigorous even though it finally turns out to be more fun. It's the characterization, I think; her people suffer more and enjoy more, my favorite being the sexual metaphor that rapidly turns into reading. Crowley's characters were more schematic, more like early .
Find in a Library
So wrote clew in Fiction (21st c.).