A gauche incarnation of Rochester

The Guardian publishes a profile of Jean Rhys with the excuse of the upcoming airing (next October 9) of a new version of Wide Sargasso Sea on BBC4.

Taunted with the cruel nickname the 'white cockroach' as a child, the author Jean Rhys grew up on the Caribbean island of Dominica. She was the daughter of a Creole mother and a Welsh father and always felt distant from both the black and white communities. Her complicated childhood was to continue to influence one of the most intriguing literary lives of the last century and inform all her writing. (...)

Even in later life, once she had become a celebrated talent and a London socialite, Rhys was dogged by self-loathing and depressive rages which alternated with phases of creative activity. These bouts of illness saw Rhys briefly imprisoned in Holloway but also drew her, most famously, to write about the best known madwoman in literature: the incarcerated Mrs Rochester in Jane Eyre. Fans of the current BBC1 dramatisation of Charlotte Bronte's 19th-century novel will be able to sample Rhys's own feverish response to Bronte fever in Wide Sargasso Sea, which is her 'prequel' to the classic.

In the novel, set in the Caribbean, Rhys invents a dark and disturbing history for the unfortunate first bride of Edward Rochester, known as Bertha Mason. Written 40 years ago, Wide Sargasso Sea clearly mined Rhys's memories of life in the lush backwaters and steamy heat of Dominica in her attempt to explain how Bronte's dishevelled figure locked in the attic came to lose her mind.

In Rhys's version, hypocrisy, betrayal, racial inequality and the fear of voodoo magic are all to blame. A white Creole, like Rhys, the heroine is neither accepted by her colonical masters, nor by the black islanders. BBC viewers will also come across a different take on Bronte's dashing, arrogant hero, Mr Rochester. On BBC1 the troubled heart-throb is being played by Toby Stephens, son of actors Maggie Smith and Robert Stephens, while on BBC4 Wide Sargasso Sea will see the actor Timothy Spall's son, Rafe, tackle a youthful, gauche incarnation of the character. Rhys's young Rochester is already a proud and suspicious man, but with the kind of prejudices and double standards in sexual fidelity that were common. (Vanessa Thorpe)

Categories: In_the_News, Movies-DVD-TV, Wide_Sargasso_Sea