This novel gives a voice to the woman who appears in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre as the secret wife kept in Mr Rochester's attic. It begins in Jamaica after the end of slavery, where a young Creole heiress, Antoinette, grows up isolated and mistrusted in a fading plantation world. She enters an arranged marriage with an English man, and the couple travel to a house in the Caribbean hills. Misunderstanding, suspicion and cultural distance slowly pull them apart. Told through shifting voices, the book is a short, haunting study of colonial power, belonging and identity, and it changed how readers think about the older story.
Quotes
They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did. But we were not in their ranks. The Jamaican ladies had never approved of my mother, ‘because she pretty like pretty self’ Christophine said. (first lines)
I thought if I told no one it might not be true.
I woke the next morning knowing that nothing would be the same. It would change and go on changing.
So it was all over, the advance and retreat, the doubts and hesitations. Everything finished, for better or for worse. (first lines)