Ships that pass in the night...

This is a remarkable story from an almost-forgotten literary genius who found success when she was in her seventies.

They say the world can be divided into Wuthering Heights people and Jane Eyre people. For the longest time, I was in the latter camp. Maybe it’s because I read Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre when I was just 12 years old and the feelings of young Jane’s alienation and search for stability seemed to speak to me. The adult Jane’s romance and the discovery of the mad woman in the attic — certainly thrilled the closet horror fan inside me — but, the eventual happy ending I didn’t much care for.

I continued to re-read Jane Eyre through my young adulthood without much reflection on the hidden storylines contained within. One late night not long before I was to start college, I caught a movie on TV about a young woman whose family fortunes had been lost growing up in Jamaica. Puzzled and fascinated, I watched as the story unfolded from the point of view of the mad woman in the attic.

The movie I’d watched was Wide Sargasso Sea and it was based on the 1966 novel by Jean Rhys. While Brontë used her novel to tell the tale of one woman, Rhys took the glossed-over plotlines in that book to tell a more discomfiting story brimming with feminist and anti-colonial fury.

In Jane Eyre, the mad woman is Bertha Rochester. In Wide Sargasso Sea, she’s given a fuller identity that makes her eventual fate in the earlier book all the more tragic and painful. Her name is Antoinette Cosway and she’s an impoverished Creole heiress who the Englishman (unnamed in the book) marries. But, personal tragedy along with the repercussions of abolition of slavery that had led to Antoinette’s family sugar plantation to collapse, results in an abusive marriage from which she cannot escape.

Rhys, who was born in Dominica in 1890, herself had Creole ancestry on her mother’s side.She was educated in England and faced mockery for her inability to speak ‘proper’ English. She had hoped of becoming an actress. But, those dreams faded and she lived for a long time on the edges of society. It was only after meeting Ford Madox Ford in 1924 that her writing ambitions crystalised. She wrote short stories and novels, but none were commercially successful.

She’d effectively vanished from the public eye until Selma Vaz Dias, an actress and writer, advertised in 1949 enquiring about her whereabouts. Dias wanted to produce a radio play based on Rhys’ novel Good Morning, Midnight. The encounter and collaboration that followed acted as a creative tonic for Rhys and she eventually finished writing Wide Sargasso Sea when she was 74 years old. The success that eluded her for much of her life came late — too late, she would say.

While Wide Sargasso Sea builds on the bones of an already remarkable story from an earlier literary genius, the reader can be forgiven for thinking that it’s Jean Rhys’ own history; the weight of the life she lived gives the book its enduring power.

The author is a Bangalore-based writer and communications professional with many published short stories and essays to her credit.

That One Book is a fortnightly column that does exactly what it says — takes up one great classic and tells you why it is (still) great. Come, raid the bookshelves with us.