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: #7790 in Books
• Published on: 2000-03-30
• 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 '20s. After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie was written in 1930. Her early novels, often portraying women as underdogs out to exploit their sexualities, were ahead of their time and only modestly successful. From 1939 onwards 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

Wonder if Jane and Rochester ever lived happily ever after?
'Wide Sargasso Sea' tells the story that 'Jane Eyre' omitted to tell - that of Rochester's first marriage to a beautiful and sensual but 'mentally unstable' Creole woman. Finally Bertha (or Antoinette as she is known here)has been given a voice to tell her side; no longer is she the mad wife forever confined to the attic. Rhys uses the tale of one woman's corruption by her misguided husband to emphasis the forgotten consequences of colonialism. The gap that exists between Antoinette and Rochester is as wide as the ocean that lies between their respective homelands. Rhys has purposely set the action a little earlier than it should logically take place, presumably to incorporate the end of slavery in the islands. Antoinette is the embodiment of the ambiguous position faced by the Creole population after the Emancipation Act. 'Wide Sargasso Sea' rescues both Antoinette from her attic imprisonment and her past from its obscurity.

The Creole side of Mrs Rochester
Jean Rhys at her best and written in the darkest hours of her life. Drawn from experiences from own her past in the West Indies as a child, she assembles the last jigsaw pieces of the mystery of Mrs Rochester from Jane Eyre, by describing the road that led to her madness. Where did she come from?
In turn this makes each book not only stand alone favourite reads, but compliment each other in such a way that is perfect to the story construction of each book. Jean Rhys has the ability to draw the reader into the construct of the characters emotions, and at the same time feel the vivid shapes of the surrounding settings, with her evocative descriptions of the lushness and isolation of the Creole lifestyle at the turn of the century.
If you are at all interested in Jean Rhys and live in London I would throughly recommend seeing the play "After Mrs Rochester" which is drawn heavily from this book. Great stuff.

Deeply moving
Antoinette, like most of Jean Rhys's other female characters, is a woman that hovers between two worlds: black and white, English coldness and tropical warmth,sanity (accepted behaviour) and madness. Although given a poignant voice, she is helpless because she doesn't know how to use it. She goes mad insofar as madness is silencing her voice and retreating more and more inside herself - and letting others speak for her. She is the perfect victim, as she doesn't distinguish the boundary between love and madness anymore. Unlike Bertha Mason in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, to which I think this novel is an answer, this woman has loved deeply and has suffered a great deal on account of that love through no fault of hers. Madness is the result of prolonged emotional distress, and comes as the only outcome when she ceases struggling against her bleak reality and can't face it anymore. Having read this book after Jane Eyre, I can't help but feel that at least Antoinette had the chance to have the voice she never had in Charlotte Bronte's novel. At last, the story told on the silenced madwoman's point of view!