Ah, marriage—the source of so much happiness, handwringing, hope, hell, and high drama that it’s the central subject of a large number of acclaimed novels.
In the mid-nineteenth century, Charlotte Brontë wrote Jane Eyre, in which we see a marriage gone so wrong that the wife, raving mad, is locked in the attic. And then, in the mid-twentieth century, Jean Rhys wrote Wide Sargasso Sea, in which we meet the young newlyweds in the Caribbean islands.
It’s no paradise of a honeymoon.
Rhys’s language is beautiful . . . the haunting kind of beautiful. The kind that might just drive you insane.
Do read it, though. Don’t let a madwoman like me scare you.
