In this novel, a young woman recently emigrated from the Windward Islands (today called Dominica) after her father has died finds herself in the unclear position of a stateless and familyless woman, when such things were not the most stable of situations. She works partly in the demimonde (the kind of underworld of crime, but specifically vice) and realizes there’s a rough road between that world and any kind of “respectability.” She has love affairs, strong racial opinions, lots of alcohol, and dangerous situations, but […]
Drama is catching.
In this novel, our lead character is youngish woman living in Paris when her husband is arrested and jailed for fencing photographs. As she begins to restructure her life, she takes up with an older writer figure and his wife and becomes unhealthily enmeshed in their lives, to the point that when her husband is released from prison, it’s not clear what she will do or even what she should do. Jean Rhys is an interesting figure especially in regards to this story. She is […]
Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman
Alan Cumming mentioned After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie in a NYT piece on his ten favorite books. Having read and reviewed (and loved) Rhys’ well known classic Wide Sargasso Sea for CBR6, and being impressed with Mr. Cumming’s literary choices (seriously, check out that list; it’s gold), I decided to give After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie a go. While it isn’t a masterpiece like Wide Sargasso Sea, it is nonetheless a brilliant and bold novel. This is one of Rhys’ early novels, published in 1930 (Wide Sargasso […]
This is Madness!
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 […]