![]() Orchids flourished out of reach or for some reason not to be touched." Underneath the tree ferns, tall as forest tree ferns, the light was green. When she comes of age she is married off to an Englishman, and he takes her away from the only place she has known-a house with a garden where "the paths were overgrown and a smell of dead flowers mixed with the fresh living smell. Wide Sargasso Sea is the story of Antoinette Cosway, a Creole heiress who grew up in the West Indies on a decaying plantation. She was also a great writer, despite her powerful self-destructive impulses. ![]() And Rhys herself was often too sad for the world-she was suicidal, alcoholic, troubled by a vast loneliness. By the '40s, however, her work was out of fashion, too sad for a world at war. Rhys had enjoyed minor literary success in the 1920s and '30s with a series of evocative novels featuring women protagonists adrift in Europe, verging on poverty, hoping to be saved by men. In 1966 Jean Rhys reemerged after a long silence with a novel called Wide Sargasso Sea. In this best-selling novel Rhys portrays a society so driven by hatred, so skewed in its sexual relations, that it can literally drive a woman out of her mind. ![]() Yet he will make her pay for her ancestors' sins of slaveholding, excessive drinking, and nihilistic despair by enslaving her as a prisoner in his bleak English home. She is sold into marriage to the coldhearted and prideful Rochester, who succumbs to his need for money and his lust. Jean Rhys's reputation was made upon the publication of this passionate and heartbreaking novel, in which she brings into the light one of fiction's most mysterious characters: the madwoman in the attic from Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre.Ī sensual and protected young woman, Antoinette Cosway grows up in the lush natural world of the Caribbean. The fortieth anniversary reissue of the best-selling "tour de force" (Walter Allen, New York Times Book Review). ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |