Good to read a serious book, after a recent diet of (too much) crime. I had never heard of this but it is extraordinary.
Jean Rhys was half Creole, her father a Welsh doctor in the Caribbean. A retelling of Jane Eyre from the standpoint of the mad wife in the attic, who was West Indian.
Divided into three parts, the first narrated by Antoinette (the wife), the second mainly by the unnamed Mr. Rochester, and the third briefly by two of his servants in Yorkshire after their return and before she burns the place down.
Part one is a brilliant narrative of West Indian society in the 19th century, part two is a less easy-to-read psychodrama of their marriage (still in the West Indies and the short part three covers the events after their return.
Difficult, but brilliant – I don’t know how I have been unaware of its existence for so long.
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