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As Jane Eyre has its Wide Sargasso Sea, Wuthering Heights now has its Windward Heights, a new novel written by the esteemed Guadeloupean author Maryse Conde. Published in French in 1995, and translated into English in 1998, Windward Heights resembles Jean Rhys's novel in that it is set in the Caribbean, partly in Cuba, but mostly in Guadeloupe, yet it differs completely in direction. While Rhys invents a history for Charlotte Bronte's character Bertha, thereby writing an entirely different story from Jane Eyre, Conde re-writes Emily Bronte's novel using the same story, only setting it in the second half of the nineteenth century, just after the abolition of slavery. Unlike Alice Hoffman's Here On Earth (1997), a twentieth-century version of the original Wuthering Heights, Conde keeps with the post-colonial genre in which Rhys writes, thereby adding another dimension to the novel's complexity -- that of race relations.
Heathcliff becomes Razye (a sort of French amalgamation of the words "heath" and "cliff"), a dark-skinned outsider, with long curly black hair,and an unknown history. The Earnshaws become the Gagneurs. Mr. Earnshaw becomes Hubert, "a tallow-coloured mulatto who...