Possession
A 1990 Booker Prize winner that runs two love stories in parallel (Victorian poets and modern academics) and uses the detective-novel structure to make you desperate for both. Byatt wrote about the way scholarly obsession can become romantic obsession, and the love letters she invented for her Victorian poets are among the most beautiful in fiction.
Byatt wrote hundreds of lines of pastiche Victorian verse for her invented poets, skillful, long, and skippable, and the novel half expects the skipping. Roland and Maud, the modern pair, are deliberately anemic beside their Victorians; deliberate does not make them fun to follow. After five hundred careful pages, the climax is a graveyard exhumation in a thunderstorm, pure gothic melodrama.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
