Annette goes insane and is consigned to the care of a servant. Paul flees to England after the servants and their countrymen revolt and burn down the mansion, killing Annette's young son. Her husband, Paul Mason (Michael York), is a sexist, racist tyrant who mistreats his servants and his wife. Plantation owner Annette Cosway (Rachel Ward) has become so poor that she marries a rich, boorish Englishman whom she does not love. In Jamaica in the 1840s, slavery has been recently outlawed. It's a story meant to be a prequel to Charlotte Bronte's novel Jane Eyre, surmising what drove the first Mrs. From 1939 (when Good Morning, Midnight was written) onwards she lived reclusively, and was largely forgotten when she made a sensational comeback with her account of Jane Eyre's Bertha Rochester, Wide Sargasso Sea, in 1966.Director John Duigan brings Jean Rhys' difficult 1966 best-selling novel to the screen. Her novels, often portraying women as underdogs out to exploit their sexualities, were ahead of their time and only modestly successful. Coming to England aged 16, she drifted into various jobs before moving to Paris, where she began writing and was 'discovered' by Ford Madox Ford. Jean Rhys (1894-1979) was born in Dominica.
This classic study of betrayal, a seminal work of postcolonial literature, is Jean Rhys's brief, beautiful masterpiece. Caught between his demands and her own precarious sense of belonging, Antoinette is inexorably driven towards madness, and her husband into the arms of another novel's heroine. After their marriage, however, disturbing rumours begin to circulate which poison her husband against her.
Her grand attempt to tell what she felt was the story of Jane Eyre's 'madwoman in the attic', Bertha Rochester, Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea is edited with an introduction and notes by Angela Smith in Penguin Classics.īorn into the oppressive, colonialist society of 1930s Jamaica, white Creole heiress Antoinette Cosway meets a young Englishman who is drawn to her innocent beauty and sensuality.
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