Where to start with Gayl Jones

This September Virago are publishing Palmares the first new book from Gayl Jones in over two decades.

Gayl Jones was first discovered and edited by Toni Morrison, and her talent was praised by writers including Maya Angelou, James Baldwin and John Updike. After a handful of acclaimed novels, she withdrew from the publishing world. Now Jones returns with her first new novel in over two decades.

In Palmares, Gayl Jones brings to life a world full of unforgettable characters, reimagining extraordinary historical events and combining them with mythology and magic. The result is a sweeping saga spanning a quarter of a century. Of Gayl Jones, the New Yorker noted, ‘[Her] great achievement is to reckon with both history and interiority, and to collapse the boundary between them.’ Like nothing else before it, Palmares embodies this gift.

Ahead of the release of this extraordinary new novel we are returning to Gayl Jones’s backlist, which includes Corregidora, The Healing and Eva’s Man. 

Here is a brief guide to Gayl Jones’s novels:

CORREGIDORA 

Probably Jones’s most famous novel, Corregidora is a breathtaking work of fiction exploring themes of race, sexuality and the long repercussions of slavery. This novel paved the way for Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Alice Walker’s The Colour Purple. Upon publication in 1975, Corregidora was hailed as a masterpiece.

‘No novel about any black woman could ever be the same after this’ Toni Morrison

Blues singer Ursa is consumed by her hatred of Corregidora, the nineteenth-century slave master who fathered both her mother and grandmother. Charged with ‘making generations’ to bear witness to the abuse embodied in the family name, Ursa Corregidora finds herself unable to keep alive this legacy when she is made sterile in a violent fight with her husband. Haunted by the ghosts of a Brazilian plantation, pained by a present of lovelessness and despair, Ursa slowly and firmly strikes her own terms with womanhood.

Listen to the Backlisted Podcast episode on Corregidora here.

EVA’S MAN

Eva Medina Canada sits in her psychiatric ward, silent and unremorseful. She has murdered her lover and they want to know why.

Eva’s Man (1976), Jones’s second novel, is an intense, searing novel exploring the damage of racial and sexual violence.

Like Corregidora, Eva’s Man relies on minimalist dialogue and on interior monologues, but the latter play an even more important role here, letting the reader see Eva Medina Canada’s past and her descent into mental illness. The reader encounters Eva in a prison for the criminally insane at the beginning of the story, to which she has been committed for poisoning and castrating her lover. Her flashbacks reveal a life of relentless sexual objectification. The men she encounters regard her as sexual property and react with violence if she rejects their approaches.

‘Gayl Jones is one furious, lacerating writer. You don’t read her easily, and you can’t forget her at all . . . Hyper-real and traumatic as this novel is, it’s one that’s been waiting to be written since Samuel Richardson gave us the male point of view of Clarissa, that other fallen woman whose only acceptable alternative to ravishment was death. Eva’s silence, and her status here as legally insane, are eloquent testimony to the condition of being a woman in this man’s world’ Kirkus

THE HEALING

The Healing (1998) follows Harlan Jane Eagleton as she travels to small towns, converting sceptics, restoring minds and healing bodies. But before she found her calling as a faith healer, Harlan had been a minor rock star’s manager and, before that, a beautician. Harlan retraces her story to the beginning, when she once had a fling with the rock star’s ex-husband and found herself infatuated with an Afro-German horse dealer. Along the way she’s somehow lost her own husband, a medical anthropologist now traveling with a medicine woman across eastern Africa. Harlan draws us deeper into her world and the mystery at the heart of her tale: the story of her first healing.

PALMARES

After more than two decades, Palmares hails the return of Gayl Jones – ‘the best American novelist whose name you may not know’ (Atlantic).

An epic tale of love and liberation set in seventeenth-century colonial Brazil.

From plantation to plantation, Almeyda, a young slave girl, hears whispers, rumours of Palmares, a hidden settlement where fugitive slaves live free. But can this promised land exist? And what price is paid for ‘freedom’?
In Palmares, Gayl Jones brings to life a world full of unforgettable characters, reimagining extraordinary historical events and combining them with mythology and magic. The result is a sweeping saga spanning a quarter of a century. Of Gayl Jones, the New Yorker noted, ‘[Her] great achievement is to reckon with both history and interiority, and to collapse the boundary between them.’ Like nothing else before it, Palmares embodies this gift.