The Orchid House
SynopsisPlot
Lally helps to raise three white sisters in the Orchid House on the Island of Dominica and observes as each flees to the cold northern lands of England and America only to return to their magical past and the man they love.
Story
About this book
The Orchid House is set on the Caribbean island of Dominica and follows three white sisters from a formerly wealthy family whose influence has faded. The story is narrated by Lally, the black nurse who raised the sisters, and her perspective gives the novel a particular angle on race, class, and colonial decline. Each sister leaves the island for England or America, and each eventually returns, drawn back to the landscape and attachments of their earlier lives.
Phyllis Shand Allfrey published this, her only novel, in 1954, during a period when political control across the British Caribbean was shifting from colonial administrators to local governments. Allfrey was a Fabian socialist who founded Dominica's first political party, and the book reflects her conviction that old colonial power structures needed fundamental change if Caribbean societies were to reach social justice. Characters who cling to a vanished past find themselves stranded by history.
The prose is sensuous and closely tied to the physical world of Dominica, its plants, its weather, and the social textures of a small island community, all filtered through Lally's watchful voice. Allfrey drew on her own family history, and the novel is often read for the clarity of its account of Dominica's twentieth-century political change.
