Abstract

This book grew out of a speech with the title 'Ms. Jane Austen', given by Selma James at the Cheltenham Literary Festival on 4 November, 1979. The theme was the women of the Great House, first in Ms. Austen's novels and then in Wide Sargasso Sea, a novel written almost 150 years later by Jean Rhys, a West Indian who lived most of her life in Europe, mainly in England, and who died in 1979. Ms. Austen's heroines are not always literally in the Great House, but they are within its ambit, as close and often poor relations, or as they eventually marry its master. Wide Sargasso Sea takes place on both sides of the Atlantic, but the Great House remains its focus. Within and around it, Ms. Rhys's white West Indian heroine confronts the historic antagonism between herself and Black women, between 'the ladies and the mammies', an antagonism which English literature has never tackled.--Adapted from "About This Book" (page 7).