Wide Sargasso Sea

After a 25 year silence, Jean Rhys published Wide Sargasso Sea, the story of Mr Rochester's mad wife in Jane Eyre. Jean Rhys, like the mad wife, grew up in the Caribbean. Came to England at 16. Unhappy, fragile and brinkish, living from day to day, job to job, drink to drink.  Mr Rochester's wife is her constitutional. Her best expression. An absentee from her own life, shut up in a secluded wing of a country house, a prisoner in a northern country whose reality she has no means of believing—except for the cold.  

The other night I watched the 1943 film of Jane Eyre with Joan Fontaine and Orson Welles. The love story of Jane and Mr Rochester, gloriously acted and filmed as it is, leaves the mad wife even more isolated,  without habitat, without sunset or looking glass. (All Jean Rhys's characters want to look at themselves, often.)

In the early 1800s, wealthy young men went out to the colonies in search of further wealth.  Charlotte Brontë could imagine Mr Rochester going in search of adventure, but could not imagine the wife he found there. That was for Jean Rhys to do. She knew the reality of the place, its flora and fauna, the mix of peoples and resentment, the troubled history, the shifting sands of money and property and status.

After reading a run of forgotten novels, early Penguins from the mid-twentieth century, my reading self, like the fasting body, was re-set and ready to receive intensity. Wide Sargasso Sea is a vertical, piercing read, a story of sunshine and death in an alien place, wild and untouched, full of secrets and lies and obeah. Too much blue, too much purple, too much green. Mr Rochester doesn't stand a chance. And neither does his wife.

I read Wide Sargasso Sea a second time, just to stay a while longer in a cold week. The book is an axe to the frozen sea within, says Kafka. 

In natural sequence you'd read Jane Eyre next, watch the Orson Welles film and wonder what Jean Rhys thought of Rochester as romantic hero and the mad wife in the tower as part of his nobility.

Instead, by who knows what osmosis: The Rector's Daughter by F. M. Mayor.

A page or two in, the Rector's daughter wishes she hadn't been born. There she is in a purposefully featureless place called Dedmayne in a flat eastern county of England, in charge of her imbecilic (sic) sister and her learned autocratic father. The brothers have all moved away. The mother is dead. 'Life hath a load which must be carried on. And safely may.'

Does it have to be like this?

The Rector is a Canon with a Library and low tolerance for anyone who hasn't read it. Occasionally he consents to 'a happy day', with lunch, a leisurely afternoon, and tea to follow. Did his daughter read Jane Eyre, when she wasn't improving with Bacon's essays or transcribing Tertullian for her father, or was Trollope her only consolation? The sister dies and then there's just the Rector, his daughter, and Cook, and the village. Much revolves around walking, reading aloud, and tea.

Did Beckett draw on 'a happy day', with tea to follow?

'There's something beyond us in the wind and clouds, I never feel heaven can be at all like July,' says the Rector's daughter in her one burst of freedom with Mr Herbert, who goes on to marry someone else. After her father dies she moves to a suburb with an aunt, where 'perhaps she lost some of that individuality, that unlikeness to the ordinary world which had given her a kind of gauche, innocent charm'.

The Rector's daughter dies in the 'flu epidemic, like James Salter's mother. 'How long it was after her father's death depends on how one judges of time.' After a brief spell of being more like other people, she was glad she didn't have to do another forty years.

Heaven isn't like July, it's a wintry burst of light, a collection of poems the Rector's daughter wrote from which 'something emerges occasionally – an odd cry from the heart, or whatever there is beyond the heart, and one feels she's curiously complete'.

Jean Rhys and F. M. Mayor, elephants in a different dark room in Paris and Cambridge in the 1920s. Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams and Flora Macdonald Mayor. People say a great deal about connectivity and the like. Tossing your reading around, is how I'd say it. The books you've read are there to be played. The Library as Keyboard. The Music of Time and how one may judge it. A tune beyond us, yet ourselves.