Unfinished: Ranee Sylvia of Sarawak
About this book
For over a hundred years, a series of White Rajahs ruled over the land of forests and swamps that is Sarawak on the island of Borneo, inhabited by a volatile mix of Malays, Dyak tribesmen, Chinese and Westerners. Sylvia Brett, born into English high society in 1885, would become the consort of the last and least of these, Rajah Vyner Brooke, and lead a turbulent life across the world up till the country’s cession to Britain at the end of World War II. But as Ranee Sylvia, ‘Queen of the Headhunters’, and a published novelist, she ricocheted between celebrity and obscurity, wealth and relative poverty, and her ‘open’ marriage and the private lives of her tempestuous daughters fed gossip columns and scandal rags for decades as she intrigued and feuded, charmed and beguiled, in a way that would both decide the fate of her subjects and influence the shape of southeast Asia up to the present day. This is the novel of her own life.