Product Description

Jean Rhys's late, literary masterpiece Wide Sargasso Sea was inspired by Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, and is set in the lush, beguiling landscape of Jamaica in the 1830s. Born into an oppressive, colonialist society, Creole heiress Antoinette Cosway meets a young Englishman who is drawn to her innocent sensuality and beauty. After their marriage the rumours begin, poisoning her husband against her. Caught between his demands and her own precarious sense of belonging, Antoinette is driven towards madness.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #11000 in Books
• Published on: 2001-04-26
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

About the Author
Jean Rhys was born in Dominica in 1894. Coming to England aged 16, she drifted into various jobs before starting to write in Paris in the late 1920's. QUARTET was first published as 'Postures' in 1928. Her novels, often portraying women as underdogsout to exploit their sexualities, were ahead of their time and only modestly successful. From 1939 she lived reclusively, and was largely forgotten when she made a sensational comeback with 'Wide Sargasso Sea' in 1966. She died in 1979.

Customer Reviews

Superb and incredibly inventive prequel to Jane Eyre
The Wide Sargasso Sea is the story of Antoinette Cosway/ Bertha Mason, the mad first wife of Mr Rochester from Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre.

It tells her story, as the marginalised outsider, and shows how she came to be locked in a grey tower in England, guarded night and day, and despised and feared by her husband, from her childhood roots in the Caribbean.

It is a brilliant book, atmospheric, passionate and political; still as relevant as when it was first written. It stands alone, without having read Jane Eyre, despite its brevity. However, it is in the context of Jane Eyre that it is really best understood.

It is always audacious to take on a classic novel in this way, but Wide Sargasso Sea does so imaginatively and sympathetically, creating characters that have a life of their own, beyond Bronte's text.

A great book that gives in depth view into the mind of "Bertha"
Even thought I didn't enjoy the film too much the book itself is phenomenal. The story of Bertha, the first Mrs. Rochester, "Wide Sargasso Sea" is a not only a brilliant deconstruction of Charlotte Bront's legacy, but is also a damning history of colonialism in the West Indies. This novel addresses the issue of race and culture, but it also addresses the inner thought processes of a woman confronted with cultural chaos between the Creole, Jamaican, and British in the Caribbean.

Told from different points of view, the text is a tapestry weaving Bertha's story with Edward Rochester's early life. Like the seaweed the book is named for, the structure floats in and out of artistic consciousness as though on a sea of many unwritten stories. Although some might argue that "Wide Sargasso Sea," detracts from "Jane Eyre," I feel that Jean Rhys gives us a fuller understanding about the cultural historiography that produces "great literature." As a champion for the silenced voices, Charlotte Bront herself was all too aware of societies' injustices.

While today, "Jane Eyre" is generally accepted as a tract on social class, feminism, and conscious production of art, 150 years ago, Bront was lambasted by contemporary critics as unchristian, seditious and a poor writer. I can not help but think Bront, as social critic, would have cheered the publication of "Wide Sargasso Sea." A wonderful book for anyone studying Latin America or the Caribbean.

Caribbean then and now
I re-read this upon finding it - along with Phyllis Shand Allfrey's The Orchid House - on a bookshelf a decade after first buying and reading both. They both depict a colonial way of life which has come to an end. Wide Sargasso Sea is quite simply an exquisite portrayal of Jamaica and the other un-named island which the newly-weds travel to and albeit short, a marvellous novel. Jane Eyre was an must for O-level but I never warmed to her, unlike Antoinette, whose story is tragic and still an enigma in the novel. Who really made her insane?...