Jean Rhys (1890–1979)

4.5 stars

This is my second Rhys book, and like the first I'd read, The Quartet, it centres a British woman stranded in Paris and financially dependent on her lovers. Julia, like Marya before her, is down on her luck, and spends the little money she receives on drink and clothes.

Because of this vulnerable position, and what she claims as failing in life on both a social and economic level, she plunges into a state of utter despair. Unlike Marya before her though Julia returns to London–on show more a whim–where she confronts the reality of her dying mother and judging family.

When the family reunites we meet Julia’s sister Norah. Antithetical to Julia in every way, she’s the dutiful daughter that remained to care and look after their ill mother while Julia drifted abroad. This conflict where Norah represents sacrifice and duty, and Julia whose representation would be best left to her own words: “If all good, respectable people had one face, I'd spit in it.” reminded me of the wonderful Munro short story “The Peace of Utrecht”, which also has two sisters with one who stayed home and cared for their mother while the other left, only Julia doesn’t return home married and with children, but alone, poor, and mentally and physically exhausted. The characterization of these two sisters as well as that final argument where Norah and Julia finally reveal their true feelings to each other was just brilliant.

Reading this I felt that the depictions of illness, despair, and death read simple yet true. Just as with the first book she shows what Austen did too, the importance given to money and (heterosexual) marriage in society, and how much they define and shape humanness, status, and survival. Only while much had changed in the century that separates Austen and Rhys, and both being very different individuals and artists. Rhys's protagonists however drift and are desperate, find themselves in the margins and alienated, not deemed respectable, suffering since they yearn for the security such status promises while they lack it. Rhys still maintains great control over her material, and I'm glad that I'm reading her novels chronologically since one can trace the development in her writing from the first one, which was also quite good, to this one. show less

She spoke as if she were trying to recall a book she had read or a story she had heard and Mr Horsfield felt irritated by her vagueness, 'because', he thought, 'your life is your life and you must be pretty definite about it. Or if it's a story you are making up, you ought at least to have it pat.'

A strange, lonely, forceful novel, entirely in line with Rhys' canon. Julia Martin, the novel's central character, is a sort of down-at-heel Lily Bart, the heroine from Wharton's The House of show more Mirth. A woman reliant on the charity of others, especially men, never quite strong enough to continue on her own but also uncertain if, or how, she could do so anyway. Flitting between a lonely London and a lonely Paris, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie is a study of those lost in the cracks of society, of the kind of cafard found in late 19th century naturalist paintings, and of the slow urban isolation felt, then, especially by women, and now, perhaps, by many more of us? show less

Wide Sargasso Sea is one of the most intellectually challenging books I've read in a while. There is so much packed into this small 100-page novel that it's no surprise scholars love it.

In Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, Mrs. Rochester is portrayed as a wild woman, mad, and subject to fits of violence and sexual depravity. True to Victorian mores, she is from the West Indies, where woman are promiscuous and prone to hysteria. Jean Rhys, herself born in Dominica, takes this assumption about show more women and especially Creole women and exposes it for what it is: the assumption of a culture steeped in colonial brutality and sexual violence against women of color.

Rhys's novel begins on Dominica in 1839, only a year after full emancipation had been granted to enslaved people in the British colonies. The Slavery Abolition Act, implemented in 1834, had paid lip-service to abolition, but required the formerly enslaved to work for their owners in an "apprenticeship" position for a year. This may have cushioned former slave owners from the immediate economic impact, but enraged those it supposedly freed. It is during this tumultuous and fraught time period that Antoinette was growing up. Heightening her precarious state, her father died, and her mother, a Creole from Martinique, was left in a vulnerable state, with both mother and daughter falling prey to avaricious men.

A young Mister Rochester, second son to a wealthy British gentleman and newly arrived in the Caribbean to seek his fortune, is quickly married to Antoinette, whom he renames Bertha (in itself a sort of violence), for thirty thousand pounds. But almost immediately, he becomes suspicious that she is promiscuous and has inherited a tendency to insanity. She must be controlled and subdued.

These dual themes of the aftermath of colonization and the treatment of women seen as Other make this a work ripe for analysis. Rhys builds on her family's history, some of whom were slave owners in Dominica, her youth on the island, and her subsequent life as a self-perceived outsider in Britain. Written over the course of two decades, when many thought she had died, so removed had she become from literary circles, the book is the result of innumerable revisions. The end product is written with an economy of language that makes every word significant. The work is divided into three parts, the first told from Antoinette's point of view growing up on the island, the second from Mr. Rochester's, and the last from Antoinette's and Grace Poole's.

Layering history, the literary relationship to Jane Eyre, and personal recollections, Wide Sargasso Sea puts the reader in the uncomfortable position between the colonizer and colonized, oppressor and oppressed, and forces them to reconsider their own relationship with both the classic text and history. show less

The writing and sense of place and purpose in this novel are so good that it almost seems redundant to mention them, because they all serve to illuminate the painful reality of the people contained within. This prequel to Jane Eyre, written because as Jean Rhys says through Antoinette: "There is always the other side. Always.", tells the story of how Rochester came by his mad wife.

And the book is all about this other side: hidden histories, told through the filter of perception, rumour and show more deception. Antoinette is unquestionably mad at the end of the novel, but is Rochester really responsible for Antoinette's madness, or is he himself mad with the lunacy of his situation? The narrative is all told in the first person, and perhaps because of this ambiguity, I'm left not knowing what to believe, but wanting to be on Rochester's side. There are no clean finishes here, nothing is clear cut or certain. The commentary accompanying this edition feels to me to be terribly one sided - Rochester is the terrible colonialist who comes to drive his wife mad. And yet the actual novel itself says that there's nothing so straight forward. They are both the broken victims of the societies and circumstances they find themselves in.

This novel is unquestionably powerful, not only because it tells a backstory of one of the most famous novels in English, but also because it paints a terrible picture of humanity and what we are capable of doing to one another. show less