“The idea for the story began some years before when my late mother-in-law, who was born in India, began talking about racial issues she had encountered or had heard talk of,” Jefferies explains. These secrets are ones that are very dependent on the location, though some might argue the story they underpin could also have happened in other colonial settings. And it turns out that her husband (who was a widower when she married him) has a related secret of his own. For years, Gwen ends up harbouring a secret that alters her relationships with others and influences most of her decisions. Set in 1920s and 1930s Ceylon, it follows Englishwoman Gwen Hooper, who, at the beginning of the story, arrives in Colombo to join her new husband Laurence, whose family had owned tea plantations for several generations.
This was most definitely the case with Dinah Jefferies’ novel The Tea Planter’s Wife. Every so often I’ll read a novel in which the setting plays a prominent, powerful and indispensable role (rather than just serving as a pretty backdrop).
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