Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw is a senior lecturer in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics at the University of the West Indies–St. Augustine. Her publications include Border Crossings: A Trilingual Anthology of Caribbean Women Writers, co-edited with Nicole Roberts; Echoes of the Haitian Revolution 1804–2004; and Reinterpreting the Haitian Revolution and Its Cultural Aftershocks (1804–2004), co-edited with Martin Munro. Loosely inspired by Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw’s new novel, Mrs. B (Peepal Tree Press Ltd.), focuses on the life of an upper-middle-class family in a contemporary Trinidad who have retreated to a gated community in response to the turbulence and violence surrounding them. Her daughter Ruthie’s easy ascent through school and university has been Mrs. B’s pride and joy for some time. But Ruthie has disgraced herself with a married man and a suicide attempt, and is, Mrs. B and her husband will soon discover, pregnant. Ruthie’s return and the state of her marriage provoke her to some unaccustomed self-reflection.
