Wide Sargasso Sea
In her brilliant novel, Jean Rhys rescues the madwoman in the attic from Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and brings her to life as the beautiful and tragic Antoinette Cosway.
The story takes us to Antoinette's beguiling Caribbean island, a lush and ravaged Eden ripped apart by escalating tensions between the former slaves and the Creole heiress's colonial family. Antoinette's marriage to a visiting Englishman seems to promise escape from the island's violent distress. But the lovers' intense affair takes a sinister turn before the honeymoon is over, as they become caught in a haunting and passionate tangle of rumour, history and betrayal.
VOYAGE IN THE DARK
'Itwas as if a curtain had fallen, hiding everything 1 had ever known, says Anna, eighteen years old and catapulted to England from the West Indies after the death of her beloved father. Working as a chorus girl, Anna drifts into the demi-monde of Edwardian London.
But there, dismayed by the unfamiliar cold and greyness, she is absolutely alone and unconsciously floating from innocence to harsh experience.
Voyage in the Dark was first published in 1934, but it could have been written today. It is the story of an unhappy love affair, a portrait of a hypocritical society and an exploration of exile and breakdown; all written in Jean Rhys's hauntingly simple and beautiful style.