Review: The Tea Planter’s Wife by Dinah Jefferies

This book is set in Ceylon in the 1920s and 1930s. We follow Gwen, a young English woman who has married an older man who owns a tea plantation. Before she even steps foot on Ceylon she starts coming upon secret after secret and the book oozes of an ominous and slightly creepy feeling. Basically all of the characters seem to be keeping secrets; there is the mysterious Mr. Ravasinghe whom Laurence, the husband, hates for no apparent reason, the sister-in-law who seems slightly unhinged, the plantation manager who seems dark and domineering and finally the husband himself who seems to distance himself from his young wife in-between moments of love and passion.

Gwen becomes pregnant soon after her arrival and the pair are happy to be starting their family. However, when she gives birth she must make a choice and this choice will haunt her for many years to come. She joins the secret keepers with a massive secret of her own and we follow the family’s dance trying to keep their own secrets while revealing everyone else’s. 

The story itself had me very interested, both because of all the secrets slowly being uncovered and simply because of the beautiful writing. Jefferies does a wonderful job of setting the scene and keeping the reader interested. I have to say though, that the ending spoiled it for me. When I started to see where it was going I was incredulous. It was the easy way out, and while we were assured, both in the story and in the postscript that this thing was possible I was still like…”MMmm, really??”. I know that it is possible for it to happen, but as I said it was the easy way out and since it was the entire plot point of the story it just seemed a little weird that the author would choose to wrap it up this way. I also felt like the final reconciliation between man and wife lacked a little something because of this, since the thing that supposedly happened didn’t happen after all, and then they just seemed to be like “Well, that was unfortunate.” I didn’t really get the closure I was looking for in that scene. 

I also felt like a few of the relationships we had been presented with over the course of the story weren’t really that well explained. I thought in the beginning that Laurence seemed almost afraid of his plantation manager, but we never really get to know why. And his sister seemed completely unhinged, and she almost seemed like she was mostly there to carry the plot along at crucial points and add an eerie feeling. We did get a little bit of insight into her motivations, but I would have liked to understand her just a bit more. 

In the end I gave this book 3,5 stars out of 5. I really enjoyed it until the last couple of chapters, when basically all the plot points were resolved by taking what I think was the easy way out.