![]() ![]() ![]() 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. In 1966 Jean Rhys reemerged after a long silence with a novel called Wide Sargasso Sea. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |