![]() ![]() In the long afternoons when the house was empty." In sunlight, in shadow, by moonlight, by candlelight. "I watched her die many times," observes the new husband. It is a voyage charged with soul-destroying lust. Wide Sargasso Seafollows her voyage into the dark, both from her point of view and Rochester's. Antoinette is Rhys's imagining of that locked-up woman, who in the end burns up the house and herself. ![]() Charlotte Brontë's book had long haunted her, mostly for the story it did not tell-that of the madwoman in the attic, Rochester's terrible secret. 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 Seais 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. Her experience of a patriarchal society and feelings of displacement during this period would form some of the most important themes in her work.In 1966 Jean Rhys reemerged after a long silence with a novel called Wide Sargasso Sea. During this period, Rhys lived in near poverty, while familiarising herself with modern art and literature, and acquiring the alcoholism that would persist throughout the rest of her life. In the 1920s, she relocated to Europe, travelling as a Bohemian artist and taking up residence sporadically in Paris. She moved to England at the age of sixteen, where she worked unsuccessfully as a chorus girl. ![]() Rhys was born in Dominica (a formerly British island in the Caribbean) to a Welsh father and Scottish mother. A "prequel" to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea won a prestigious WH Smith Literary Award in 1967. Her first four novels were published during the 1920s and 1930s, but it was not until the publication of Wide Sargasso Sea in 1966 that she emerged as a significant literary figure. Jean Rhys (originally Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams) was a Caribbean novelist who wrote in the mid 20th century. ![]()
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