![]() ![]() Where Brontë's gothic is cold and dark, Rhys's sweats and swelters. ![]() There is nothing idyllic about life on this island, and Dominican-born Rhys is brilliant at evoking the swarming oppressiveness of relentless sunshine. When she is a child, the family mansion is torched and a girl whom she wants to be her friend throws a rock at her head – incidents that resound with distorted echoes of Jane Eyre. How had I never noticed this before? Could it be that the poor little orphan of my memory was harbouring vengeful fantasies? Had I all along been mistaking a gothic character for a Dickensian one? It's with assumptions such as this that Jean Rhys plays in her fabulously atmospheric exploration of the life of the first Mrs Rochester.Īntoinette Conway is an orphan, too, as a Creole heiress marooned in Jamaica, in the ruins of a slaving culture that has made her a pariah to her black neighbours. I got out my old copy of Jane Eyre, and there was the evidence: "The fiend pinning down the thief's pack behind him" "the black horned thing seated aloof on a rock, surveying a distant crowd surrounding a gallows." I'd always assumed that Jane was escaping into beautiful avian images, but it turns out that a far more gothic imagination is hidden between the chapters, in a series of sinister miniature engravings. ![]()
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