Only their grandfather finds solace in the crumbling family house, endlessly painting their story onto a large canvas map. Their mother, enraged by years of unhappy marriage, embraces merry widowhood. His twin children, Morwenna and Corwin, flee in separate directions to take up their adult lives. John Venton's drunken fall from a Devon cliff leaves his family with an embarrassing ghost. When I was eighteen, my father fell off a cliff. Part mystery, part psychological drama, Julia Rochester's The House at the Edge of the World is a darkly comic, unorthodox and thrilling debut LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILEYS WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION AND SHORTLISTED FOR THE DESMOND ELLIOTT PRIZE 2016 (All writers are magpies.) It was only when I sat down to write this that I remembered the parrot, Coco, trying to fly on clipped wings ‘all on fire’, but I have just now realised that, in my latest manuscript, I have brought him back from the dead and re-named him Oscar. I wonder if any Devon landscape made its way into the lush and hostile Caribbean setting of Wide Sargasso Sea, and if I, having read and re-read it several times over the years, put something of Jean Rhys’ Jamaica into my Devon.Ĭertainly, I have stolen from her. Later, she moved inland, to a small village, which she described as ‘a dull spot which even drink can’t enliven much’. I had not remembered, until I read something of Jean Rhys’ background for this piece, that she lived for many years in Devon, where I have set my novel The House at the Edge of the World.įor some of those years she was in Bude, which is on the stretch of North Devon coast which I have fictionalised (or, more accurately, fantasised) in the book. Keep it down as much as possible.’ Rhys pares away at language until you are left with pure impression – like that wine dispersed into water. Her editor, Diana Athill, recalls how she would say, ‘Cut, cut, cut. ‘You see what I mean!’ And we shared a moment of perfect mutual understanding, because Rhys is one of those writers who conjures whole worlds out of the simplest few words. He sat in the garden, surrounded by tropical plants, and at one point he looked up from the book and said, with awe, ‘Wow! The parrot!’ I passed it on to a friend with whom we were travelling. I wanted to read it in a Caribbean climate. Jean Rhys, who grew up in Dominica, turns her West Indian insight into the story of a Creole heiress in post-emancipation Jamaica, and her descent into madness when she is married to Edward Rochester.Ī few years back I took Wide Sargasso Sea on holiday with me to Barbados. One mind-colour altering novel that I return to again and again is Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea. It is the story of the first Mrs Rochester, but is far from being an adjunct to Jane Eyre. ‘I’ve dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas: they’ve gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind.’ Catherine is talking about dreams, but apply ‘read’ and ‘books’ to the sentence and there you have the perfect image for how words enter consciousness: Catherine is talking to Nelly (while Heathcliff fatefully eavesdrops: if only he had stayed to hear the end of the conversation how different English Literature would be). There is a beautiful line in Wuthering Heights.
This classic study of betrayal, a seminal work of postcolonial literature, is Jean Rhys's brief, beautiful masterpiece.I am not sure ‘influence’ is the best word for what reading does to writing. 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.
Jean Rhys's masterpiece tells the story of Jane Eyre's 'madwoman in the attic', Bertha Rochester.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. 'Rhys took one of the works of genius of the 19th Century and turned it inside-out to create one of the works of genius of the 20th Century' Michele Roberts One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World'