An 1859 Caribbean Perspective on Jane Eyre

Abstract

The year 1859 marked the 25th anniversary of the coming into force of the Emancipation Act and the centenary of the birth of William Wilberforce. In 1859, too, Cousin Stella; or Conflict, the first Caribbean reworking of Jane Eyre, was published by Smith, Elder, the original publisher of Jane Eyre, on the strength of a recommendation by Elizabeth Gaskell, Brontë’s biographer.¹ Its anonymous author was expatriate Jamaican writer Henrietta Camilla Jenkin (1808–85), a white Creole. The three-volume novel is a Bildungsroman, told in the third person, which traces the development of white Creole Stella Pepita Joddrell, whose history refigures aspects of Brontë’s characters Jane Eyre and Adèle Varens, and is set largely between 1828 and 1832. In Cousin Stella; or Conflict Jenkin strikingly reworks a considerable number of narrative topoi from Jane Eyre to create an analogue or parallel text, rather than shifts the balance of the story to the point of view of one of the minor characters.² Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), which meshes together first-person voices of Antoinette (Bertha) Cosway Mason, the unnamed Edward Rochester, and Grace Poole to reconstruct a ‘plausible’ life of Bertha Mason (Letters 156), has been the most influential retelling of the latter kind.³ Rhys writes that she ‘was vexed’ by Brontë’s ‘portrait of the “paper tiger” lunatic, the all wrong Creole scenes’ (Letters 262).