Almanacs are full of lists of global and national historic events. But “This Day in History” feature invites you to not just peruse a list, but to take a trip back in time to see how a significant event originally was reported in the Chicago Tribune.
She is a beautiful woman who lives caught in a web of superstition and fear, on an island in the sun. He is a rakish, handsome young man from England, out to visit his friends and perhaps make his fortune. A marriage is arranged between them - a marriage no less attractive because she is the mistress of a great estate. At first love is the only thing that matters. Then shadows begin to fall, caused by their own weaknesses, and also by the black magic of voodoo.
This is the sort of story outline you might expect to find on the back of a paperback romance novel, one of those books with a heaving bosom on the cover, and a dark tower with a light in one window. But the Gothic tradition has inspired all sorts of writers, perhaps because it provides a shortcut to our deepest yearnings and fears, and this is in fact the plot of Wide Sargasso Sea, a novel by Jean Rhys, the British author whose reputation continues to hold strong among those lonely few who actually read good fiction, instead