‘Do you think that too,’ she said, ‘that I have slept too long in the moonlight?’

I don't trust people who are super into classic English romances. I like Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, etc. but not at the exclusion of other things. there just tends to be a high co-occurrence between these people and religious freaks, I think because this kind of literature can easily promote an extremely simple, extremely white worldview. if there is such a place as Jamaica it is as far away and as relevant as Mars when it comes to whether Jane and Rochester will find love. pre-1900 the only places that existed were England and the U.S.

so in addition to being explicitly feminist (maybe Rochester WASN'T a cool dude for Yellow Wallpapering his wife), Rhys also explores race, class, colonization, and literally the existence of the rest of the world as contextual factors for Victorian literature. she also doesn't treat race like a binary, my guess is because of her lived experience growing up in Dominica. she writes beautifully and painfully. this lives up to the hype.