You don’t need to have read Jane Eyre to love Wide Sargasso Sea, but if you have, you will never think of it in the same way again.

Wide Sargasso Sea writes back to Jane Eyre as a prequel. It traces the life of Rochester’s wife, Antoinette, from before she became the mad woman in the attic and up to the time of the fire at Thornfield Hall that left Rochester blinded and physically debilitated, able at last to marry Jane.

Jean Rhys was born in Dominica of a Welsh father and a Creole mother. She was, like many children of colonialists, minded and nurtured by black servants. She went to England at 16 to finish her education. Later, displaced and alienated, after living the life of a demi-mondaine, she began to write. Her books are full of her sense of otherness, usually from the autobiographical point of view of women who are grudgingly dependent on unreliable men.

Subject to depression and alcoholism, Rhys stopped writing for almost 20 years after the publication of her fifth book Good Morning, Midnight, in 1939. In 1958, following a BBC dramatisation of the novel, she was rediscovered (most people had thought she was dead). Some stories she had written in the interim were published, and she claimed she was working on the manuscript that would become Wide Sargasso Sea. Reading her letters, it is clear that she had revisited an old idea and that she procrastinated, and probably prevaricated, for some years about the progress of the book. But eventually she was happy enough with a draft to send it to her assiduous editor, Francis Wyndham.

The result, first published in 1966, was a brilliant novel that is possibly one of the earliest post-modernist works in English, although Rhys is always described as a modernist. It is certainly post-colonialist and post-feminist. Rhys was ‘shocked’ at her first reading of Jane Eyre: she knew all about mad Creole heiresses, and the way they were exploited by everyone. She determined to give Rochester’s wife an identity and a voice.

But, in doing so, she did much more. This novella-length book is incredibly complex and wide-ranging. It opens up an exotic world and plumbs the depths of the subconscious. It also reveals unpalatable truths behind the respectable facade of the English gentry – subtly reminding us, for example, that Rochester’s fortune, like that of many another English gentleman, was built on his marriage to an heiress and ultimately on the slave trade.

Part One is narrated by Antoinette. It describes her childhood on the derelict Coulibri estate in Jamaica with her widowed mother Annette struggling to survive with two children, one of whom is an invalid, among hostile servants and other locals.

Slavery has recently been abolished. Some of the emancipated have chosen to stay with their ex-owners, but others have nowhere to go and their discontent and anger have grown.

Christophine is one who has stayed. She is a Dominican woman, bought and given to Annette as a wedding present and she, also an outsider, interprets the world for Antoinette and is a powerful and motivating presence in the novel: hers is the first voice we hear apart from Antoinette’s. She is not the patronised and sentimentalised black Mammy of Gone With the Wind – she is a fully realised character, opinionated, rumoured to practise Obeah, and a shrewd judge of people and events.

After Annette marries Mr Mason, a rich and recently arrived Englishman, things get worse. The locals have barely tolerated them while they were poor – ‘They hated us. They called us white cockroaches’  – and now that they are rich the hostility becomes overt and threatening. Mason, representing the incomers avid to exploit the unsettled times, refuses to acknowledge what Annette knows:

‘They’re too damn lazy to be dangerous,’ said Mr Mason. ‘I know that.’

‘They are more alive than you are, lazy or not, and they can be dangerous and cruel for reasons you wouldn’t understand.’

Annette’s fears are justified. Coulibri is attacked and the house is burnt down. Antoinette’s brother, Pierre, dies; the family moves away and Annette sinks into a despairing madness. Antoinette is sent to school and after a couple of years, beautiful and now the heiress to the restored estate and a fortune, she is deemed ripe for the marriage market. Enter ‘Rochester’ ­(he is never named in the novel), an impoverished young English gentleman seeking a rich wife.

At first, things go well. But what might have been a joyous love match is distorted by Rochester’s inability to cope with the place and its barrage of sensual impressions – indeed with sensuality itself – and by one of Christophine’s love potions gone awry. He chooses to believe malicious gossip and to preserve his sense of propriety. The marriage reverts to one of convenience and Antoinette is desolated.

Rochester is given his say in Part Two, which he narrates with various characters, most notably Antoinette’s ‘coloured’ half-brother Daniel Cosway, giving their biased versions of the events Antoinette has already described in Part One. Here we see how the place assaulted his senses:

Everything is too much, I felt as I rode wearily after her. Too much blue, too much purple, too much green. The flowers too red, the mountains too high, the hills too near.

We see, too, how nearly he went over the brink into love and passion, how he believes he has saved himself from disaster and how he has at least some self-knowledge, some appreciation of what he has, in fact, lost:

I hated the mountains and the hills, the rivers and the rain. I hated the sunsets of whatever colour, I hated its beauty and its magic and the secret I would never know. I hated its indifference and the cruelty which was part of its loveliness. Above all I hated her. For she belonged to the magic and the loveliness. She had left me thirsty and all my life would be thirst and longing for what I had lost before I found it.

In Part Three, set in England, Antoinette (renamed Bertha by her husband) returns as the narrator:

… I open the door and walk into their world. It is, as I always knew, made of cardboard. I have seen it before somewhere, this cardboard world where everything is coloured brown or dark red or yellow that has no light in it. As I walk along the passages I wish I could see what is behind the cardboard. They tell me I am in England but I don’t believe them. We lost our way to England. When? Where? I don’t remember, but we lost it.

Considered mad, she is confined to the attic room at Thornfield Hall, under the cold care of Grace Poole. From this point the story follows the events of Jane Eyre after Jane’s arrival, but from Antoinette’s point of view, complicating and illuminating all that is said and unsaid in Brontë’s novel.

Wide Sargasso Sea is elegantly minimalist in style, with sparing but tellingly evocative descriptive passages. As readers we come away with such a strong sense of detail, place and character that we might have been reading a much larger book. It abounds with metaphor and symbolism, both on the page and subtextually: the burning parrot, its wings clipped, plummeting to its death in the sack of Coulibri; the various forms of enslavement; the intertwining images of heat, fire, madness and sexuality; the changing of Antoinette’s name and the omission of Rochester’s; the contrasting use of heat and cold to suggest personalities and place; the description of the garden:

Our garden was large and beautiful as that garden in the Bible – the tree of life grew there. But it had gone wild. The paths were overgrown and a smell of dead flowers mixed with the fresh living smell. Underneath the tree ferns, tall as forest tree ferns, the light was green. Orchids flourished out of reach or for some reason not to be touched … Twice a year the octopus orchid flowered … a bell-shaped mass of white, mauve, deep purples, wonderful to see. The scent was very sweet and strong. I never went near it.

All of this adds up to a richly multi-layered narrative that gives voice and identity to not only the madwoman in the attic, but to many who have been marginalised in literature – the poor, the enslaved, the colonised, the illegitimate and the disenfranchised.

Jean Rhys Wide Sargasso Sea Penguin 2015 PB 192pp $19.95

This review was originally published in the Newtown Review of Books on 28 July 2016

Sophisticated narrative layering and emotional insight make Wuthering Heights an extraordinary novel.

I believe Wuthering Heights to be one of the best (if not the best) English novels of the 19th century, possibly ever. I’ve read it perhaps 20 times, taught it in various writing courses, and with each reading and discussion I find something new to admire, something new to notice. FR Leavis couldn’t categorise it in his attempt to quantify English literature – he called it a ‘sport’ (meaning a freak). Sport it may be; it’s certainly unique for the time, both in its structure and its imaginative power.

First, there is the sophistication of the narrative layering. The outside narrator is the nerdy Mr Lockwood, writing in his diary, who has come to rent the manor house Thrushcross Grange from a Mr Heathcliff.

The next major narrative layer is that of Nellie Dean, who tells Lockwood about the history of the place and the people; but slyly, and with absolute artistic rightness, her version is preempted by Catherine Earnshaw’s diary, another narrative level, which Lockwood finds when he is forced to spend a night at Wuthering Heights among the viper’s nest of the extended families of the Heathcliffs, Earnshaws and Lintons. Gentleman though he purports to be, Lockwood has no compunction in reading the journal. This device is not unusual in 18th and 19th-century fiction – particularly the Gothic, which was frequently epistolatory, using letters and diaries to tell inside stories – but the placement here shows a maturity way beyond that of a first-time novelist.

Later that night Lockwood has a ghostly visitation from Cathy, tapping at the window to be let in, which drives Heathcliff into paroxysms of regret when he hears about it, as the one thing he desires is to be haunted by her:

‘And I pray one prayer – I repeat it till my tongue stiffens – Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living! You said I killed you – haunt me, then! … Be with me always – take any form – drive me mad! Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you!’

Nelly Dean has been the housekeeper at Wuthering Heights, and a nursemaid to some of the children. Hers is a first-person eyewitness account of everything that happened 20 years ago. She is also an important participant in the events of the story. She relates how Heathcliff came to Thrushcross Grange as a foundling, adopted by Catherine’s father, how he was bullied and despised by everyone except Mr Earnshaw and Cathy, and how the two young people found their soulmates in each other.

Inside Nellie’s first-person narration, in addition to her own observations, is reported speech: what the central characters have said to her. Although we have to believe her reportage, our knowledge of her personality and her partisanship colours the events she describes, as does our suspicion that she might not have fully understood what was going on.

Really the essential story – thwarted passion – could belong to any romance. But having to unpeel the layers of narrative to find the pearl within lifts Wuthering Heights into a different category.

Neither Nellie Dean nor Lockwood is a reliable narrator, and this complicates the telling. Lockwood is a conventional 19th-century gentleman; Nellie Dean is biased and she has been complicit in the events of the novel. This means that their attitudes can be easily discarded by the reader, but still inevitably influence the story. Their prejudices should turn us against the lovers, but in fact have the opposite effect, because we can discount their perceptions when it suits us. Our sympathies are all with Catherine and Heathcliff, and this is directly because of the clever manipulation of unreliable narration.

Secondly there is the characterisation – Heathcliff, the abused and probably bastard child, later the embittered and violent older man; Catherine, the spoiled and selfish pampered daughter of wealthy parents; Lockwood; Edgar Linton, Catherine’s husband; Catherine’s daughter, ‘young’ Catherine and her nephew Hareton, promising redemption in the next generation; Nellie Dean; the pious, hypocitical and judgmental servant Joseph, and others, all stand out clearly as ‘real’ people in this novel. There are no caricatures; everyone has a unique personality and comes with his or her own baggage.

As we now know, abuse continues through the generations. Emily Brontë knew this too. Heathcliff, tormented and humiliated himself as a child, perpetuates the pattern with his wife, Isabella Linton (Edgar’s sister), and with Hareton Earnshaw.

Thirdly there is the fact that we very seldom see the story from the protagonists’ own points of view without the filter of another narrator. But who can come away from the book without knowing this is the story of Heathcliff and Catherine and their grand, doomed passion and empathising with them completely? This is an amazing sleight-of-hand. What might have been dismissed as melodrama and passion bordering on the psychotic is tempered and mediated by pragmatic and often unsympathetic recounting.

Then there is the socio–political context. Unlike her contemporaries, Austen and Dickens, Emily Brontë was not concerned with satire – gentle, humorous and forgiving in Austen’s case, more savage in that of Dickens. In fact, she was an early realist, prefiguring George Eliot (without the polemics) and Thomas Hardy. Brontë’s concern was with the stories of the individuals who suffered, or thrived, under the brutal English class system, and she wrote passionately about their lives, exposing religious hypocrisy, class and gender inequality through characterisation and action, laying bare the nasty realities beneath the English bucolic myth. She could have coined the expression ‘the personal is the political’.

And there is the last section of the book, when Lockwood returns after an absence, echoing the early chapters where he first meets everybody and moving the ‘present’ story forward. What could have produced an unwieldy structure here has in fact balanced the narrative beautifully. It should also be said that without this redemptive coda the book might have been even more maligned than it was when it was first published. Even Heathcliff, irredeemable and violent to the last, has to evoke sympathy in the end for his lifelong raw anguish and passion. But the next generation will not repeat the mistakes of the past; the reverberations of Heathcliff’s awful childhood and his malign influence have finally run their course.

It is the characterisation of Catherine that most interests me, however. People talk of Jane Eyre being a feminist model, and, yes, she had to struggle to make her own way in a bleak and hostile world – yet to me she seems hypocritical, taking the moral high ground over other people’s sins and weaknesses but forgiving of Rochester’s attempted bigamy, lying and wife-abuse. As with any conventional romantic heroine, these considerations go by the board because Jane is in love with him and wants to marry him. And, reader, she did! Rochester holds all the power in the relationship until Jane finds out about his wife, and it is not until the end of the novel, when he is brought low by events beyond Jane’s control, rendered physically and emotionally dependent, that she can claim any real equality and look forward to her happily-ever-after.

Catherine, however, holds all the emotional power from the beginning. Although she is a drama queen, without Jane’s intellect and common sense, she is strongly self-preserving and self-knowing. She realises there can be no happily-ever-after with Heathcliff and, as a woman bound by class and convention, without real freedom of choice, she settles for security over passion, propriety and emotional peace over the depth of her own feelings:

‘I’ve no more business to marry Edgar Linton than I have to be in heaven and if the wicked man in there had not brought Heathcliff so low I shouldn’t have thought of it. It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now so he shall never know how I love him and that not because he’s handsome Nelly but because he’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of his and mine are the same and Linton’s is as different as a moonbeam from lightning or frost from fire.’

One of the many ironies of the novel is that the eavesdropping Heathcliff only listens until ‘It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now’ – then he skulks away, heartbroken and enraged.

Catherine chooses herself, anyway. It costs her emotionally, but she is willing to pay the price, at least until the end. Paradoxically, although she is ostensibly more shallow than Jane Eyre, she is finally, I think, a more complex character, with a greater control over her own life and feelings, however suppressed they may be – and their suppression adds its own texture and depth. She has a greater self-awareness than Jane, who does not often examine her own motivations:

‘And you love Edgar, and Edgar loves you. All seems smooth and easy: where is the obstacle?’

‘Here! and here!’ replied Catherine, striking one hand on her forehead, and another on her breast: ‘in whichever place the soul lives. In my soul and in my heart, I’m convinced I’m wrong!’

And finally, pervading the whole story, there is the atmospheric evocation of the moors, the mist, the storms (all the pathetic fallacies of the Gothic), metaphorically rendering the characters and events larger than life; elemental beings and happenings in a wild landscape, yet still individuals who suffer, and sometimes rejoice, each in his or her own way.

There are many other aspects, many other details, that make Wuthering Heights an extraordinary novel that will reward the reading. It was Emily Brontë’s only published book and she died, aged 30, in 1848, the year after it came out under the pseudonym of Ellis Bell.

This review originally appeared in the Newtown Review of Books on 16 June 2016

Retreating from a youth of misplaced passion among the romantic poets, Claire Clairmont has spent the rest of her life in obscurity. That is until scholar Simeon Collings tracks her down. Will he get his hands on her memoirs of Byron and Shelley?

Available now from Amazon.

More Anna Southwood crime now available.

Anna Southwood is known for taking cases with very little to go on, and this time is no different. When her employer is threatened and assaulted, Anna attempts to unravel the various strands in this engaging mystery alone.

Available now from Amazon.

This gripping standalone thriller set in Sydney is now available.

Journalist Noel Baker reads a particularly disturbing coroner’s report and decides to investigate the deaths of a group of abused children. The killer is still on the loose…

Available now from Amazon.

Blockbuster! Fergus Hume and The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, Lucy Sussex

The Mystery of a Hansom Cab was published in 1886 (predating the first Sherlock Holmes story by a year) and has never been out of print. Hume himself died in poverty although the book sold millions.

Blockbuster explores the mystery of Fergus Hume and uncovers fascinating details of his life – for example, that he was born at a county pauper and lunatic asylum. Well-researched and scholarly, this is also a charmingly witty book by an author who is a literary detective herself (Sussex ‘discovered’ the first Australian mystery writer, Mary Fortune). You don’t have to have read Hansom Cab to enjoy Blockbuster – though you may find yourself driven to buy it afterwards.

The Last Policeman Trilogy, Ben H Winters

I read the first two of these novels (The Last Policeman and Countdown City) last year and the final book (World of Trouble) in 2015.

The series follows the activities of Henry (Hank) Palace, an American policeman living in the last six months or so of the Earth’s existence, before the asteroid known as Maia collides with the planet. Hank is a surprising hero – neither exceptional or gung-ho, his heroism lies in his determination to keep going, to do his job as well as he can, whether the world is ending or not.

The novels are a successful combination of police-procedural and apocalyptic fiction, with Hank continuing to investigate crime while civilisation crumbles around him.

The trilogy is notable for its posing of eternal questions, like what it means to be human and whether morality is circumstantial or absolute. It’s an example of the best SFF – indeed the best fiction – available now. (You can read my review here.)

The Defenceless, Kati Hiekkapelto

I’m a sucker for Nordic crime and I’ve read lots again this year, many of which have been great reads so it’s hard to pick the stand-outs. But Finnish Kati Hiekkapelto is definitely one of the more interesting new Scandinavian writers. Her first crime novel, The Hummingbird, was published in English in 2014 and introduced police rookie Anna Feketa, a refugee from Serbia. In The Defenceless Anna’s more experienced and her relationship with her older colleague, the loner Esko, develops further into friendship.

As with The Hummingbird, the plotting is intricate and compelling, involving refugees, a drug gang trying to move into Finland and a possible murder. It’s beautifully written; the landscape fascinates; the characters are well-drawn and their development is something to watch through what I hope will be a long series.

The Silent Dead, Claire McGowan

This is the third book (after The Lost and The Dead Ground) in a series featuring Paula Maguire, a forensic psychologist reluctantly back home in Northern Ireland and working for a missing persons unit.

Five years after a bomb attack the suspects, found not guilty at the time, disappear – then the bodies begin to turn up.

It’s hard for the police to put aside the feeling that the victims aren’t worth much time or effort, and this moral dilemma infuses the story – what is the difference between justice and revenge? As well, the memory of the Troubles hovers over these books like a dark cloud that just will not go away, adding historical complexity and the dramatic tension of sectarian feuds and old grievances still simmering. It’s this sense of an insoluble problem at the heart of things, as well as the clean, engaging writing, that provide depth and texture, lifting these books well above most police procedurals.

On Beulah Height, Reginald Hill

I’d read most of the Dalziel and Pascoe series before, but I had a bit of a binge this year with a couple I hadn’t read leading me back to re-read some favourites.

On Beulah Height is the 17th in the 24-book series  (some of which are short-story collections) that began with A Clubbable Woman in 1970, and while I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s the best – they are all good – it’s the work of a writer at his peak.

Fifteen years ago three young girls vanished after their remote Yorkshire town was flooded to create a reservoir.  Now Dalziel’s never-solved case rises to the surface again with another child missing and the return of local-girl-made-good, opera singer Elizabeth Wulfstan, to present her idiomatic translation of Mahler’s Songs on the Death of Children.

Police-procedural, history and a ghost story, combined with Pascoe coping with a major family problem, this multi-layered novel shows Hill’s elegant writing to perfection. Fat Andy Dalziel (pronounced ‘Dee-el’) and Peter Pascoe are familiar characters from the TV series, but if you haven’t read the books, you’ve got 24 treats in store.

Originally published in the Newtown Review of Books on 24 December 2015

Jean’s first crime novel featuring detective Anna Southwood, Worse Than Death, is now available as an ebook from Endeavour Press.

Two further Anna Southwood novels, To Make a Killing and Signs of Murder, are forthcoming.