We are five months into 2016 and this is my first book review. I’ve read a couple books this year, but between me trying to figure out my life and traveling a bit, it’s been difficult to force myself to sit still for a moment and collect my thoughts. And getting through this tome was a bit of a problem for me. I had heard about it because A Brief History of Seven Killings won the Man Booker prize award last year, and many reviewers — while […]
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 […]