I don’t know why I’m surprised I didn’t enjoy this. I nearly always react poorly to post-modernism. But, I really *wanted* to enjoy it. Every time I’ve read Jane Eyre, I’ve thought Bertha Rochester, née Mason, got a really shit deal. I’ve also thought it was really suspect that we don’t actually get any evidence of her going mad prior to being locked in an attic for years and years. I mean, if I’d been locked in an attic for that long maybe I would start […]
Weird mix of weird
Across Five Aprils: 4/ 5 Stars This is another Civil War book, and another Civil War book taking place in the midwest, that I read as a kid. I grew up in the South and thought about the Civil War a LOT. It happens. Anyway, like Rifles for Watie mentioned in the previous one, this focuses on the western theater of the war but still deals a lot with the news from the East. This becomes a kind of interesting conceit, where our main character […]
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 […]