The red dress

In Jean Rhys's The Wide Sargasso Sea, Antoinette is recast as Bertha by Mr Rochester. It is a name with which he feels more comfortable. From a tic in her sleep, all shifts and Bertha, with her name -a name which is not her colour and is, most likely, an insult to her pride - shifts to a private world where  shapes are lurid and vivid and where she has no sense of being loved. Instead, she is sold like a chattel, exchanged as currency for land. Maybe, like a piece of cargo, she goes on her journey to the attic in the old great house where she is, to generations of school students, the prime example of the mad woman in the attic. Mr Rochester's first wife.

But sometimes at night, Antoinette -for that, of course, is who she really is - runs through the corridors of the great house. Sometimes, Jane Eyre hears her. But no-one visits Antoinette. She is insane, lost to that private world in which nothing makes sense. One day, she takes a candle and she runs. There is fire, maybe by intent, maybe through her own special brand of lunacy. If you've read Jane Eyre, this part of the story is known to you. But if you've read the former (and I should say second, though first in narrative) book, then the mad woman in the attic is something else to you. She is a woman treated cruelly; beautiful, turned savage and formed in the heat beyond the wide Sargasso sea. But, for the last few moments, she is free and I imagine that she stands, face to the cool, foreign English air, high up on the walls somewhere. Round and about - there in the countryside or beyond in the towns -- there might be English ladies, in subdued colours of slate grey and cream or charcoal, with maybe an ornament of pearl or a pretty cameo. But high up in the house, Antoinette stands, in her long red dress - the dress which she had hauled from the Caribbean, all secretly smouldering  in its trunk. And she is aflame. And she is beautiful.