The Content Reader

This is a book in my second line of 'connected' reading. The first and previous book was Wide Sargasso Sea  so the connection is the author. See ny new 'Connected' page here  or go directly from the Home page. As mentioned in my review of the previous book the author is new to me. And what a pleasant surprise. Having finished the second book, I look forward reading more by Rhys. She has a simple, poetic, down to earth language in her stories, which is quite fascinating. The two books I have read have another thing in common. The story takes places in Dominica and England, and tells of the difficulties to come from an exotic, beautiful, warm island to the coldness of England. Both in the different climates, but also how people are behaving.

This is the first book in my second 'line' choice of 'Connective Reading'. This is the book that tells the story about the 'mad woman in the attic' in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. Jean Rhys was born in Dominica and came to England when she was sixteen. She tried a lot of professions before she started writing. She was one of the artists in Paris in the 1920s and Ford Madox Ford helped her publish her first stories. She had not published anything since 1939 when she made this remarkable come back in 1966. It saw her win the Royal Society of Literature Award and the W.H. Smith Award. She was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1966 and a CBE in 1978. She died in 1979, at the age of eighty-four. Having had a background in Dominica, Jean Rhys was really suitable to write about Rochester's first wife who was born there. We don't get to know too much about her in Charlotte Brontë's book, just the tantalising information that Roch...

Today I visited the library in Overijse for the first time. I wanted to check whether they had any books in English. And...yes, they did. Also in French, Spanish, Italian and German. The choice was quite interesting with a mixture of new, old and classics. There are many books there that I can borrow. I started with two books by Jean Rhys; Wide Sargasso Sea  about the 'mad woman in the attic' in Jane Eyre. This is the story about her life in Jamaica before and after meeting Mr Rochester. The other book is Voyage in the Dark . I don't know so much about this book but it sounds interesting. A brief liaison with a kindly but unimaginative man leads Anna to abandon the theatre and drift into the demi-monde of 1914 London: red-plush dinners in private rooms 'up West'; ragtime, champagne and whisky back at the flat; these, and a discreet tinkle of sovereigns in the small hours pave the way to disaster...