Antoinette Cosway, the main character of this novel, is the crazy woman in the attic in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. Rhys imagines the life of Rochester’s first wife and the events that drove her to madness, demonstrating her knowledge and understanding of Jamaican/West Indies history and culture as well as the powerful socio-economic forces that influenced post-Emancipation development there. As Francis Wyndham writes in the introduction, …Rhys knew about the mad Creole heiresses in the early nineteenth century, whose dowries were only an additional burden […]
Dear Fake Character People: An Open Letter to (most of) the Characters in Jane Eyre
On this my third reading of this book, I thought I’d try something a little bit different for the review. It was either this or wax poetic like the ex-graduate student that I am, and nobody here wants to read that. (Not to mention, they don’t let you curse in graduate level writing, which is one of the many reasons I decided not to do that sort of thing anymore.) – – – Dear Mrs. Reed, You are a dick. In the parlance of your time, […]