![]() ![]() Rhys writes in her autobiography Smile Please that as he “was a slave-owner the Lockharts, even in my day, were never very popular. Rhys’s great-grandfather James Potter Lockhart (1774-1837) had owned enslaved people and plantations. Her Welsh father William Rees Williams was a government medical officer who had settled in Dominica in the 1880s her mother Minna was a white Creole whose family had lived for several generations in Dominica. Rhys was born Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams in Roseau, Dominica in 1890, and lived as an expatriate in England and Europe from 1907 until her death in 1979. In Rhys’s novel, the Sargasso Sea is a symbol of what separates Antoinette Cosway Mason Rochester and Edward Fairfax Rochester: disparate colonial and imperial histories and experiences Rochester’s visceral racism and disdain for the mixing of cultures his abhorrence and fear of the tropical landscape and dispossession of Antoinette. ![]() Sargasso seaweed with waves and sandy beach. ![]()
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