The things you’ll read about Wide Sargasso Sea will amaze you. So before even reading it, you’ll sense how powerful it is. And meeting with Jean Rhys with Wide Sargasso Sea is the easiest way to connect with her. It is impossible not to get into the surreal atmosphere of this book.
The story that begins in that magical atmosphere of the Caribbean ends in a gloomy house in England. While you feel all the sadness that reaches from mother to daughter, you will be shaken by the beauty of nature in the background. You will smell the flowers and hear the sound of the river. In this best-selling novel, Rhys reveals her distorted relationships and how disgusting society can be. You cannot even feel sorry for the madness of women in such a community. If you have read Jane Eyre, you will see much more about her, and if you haven’t, you’ll want to read Jane Eyre. I strongly recommend this exquisite book to all the women.
Wide Sargasso Sea
Her grand attempt to tell what she felt was the story of Jane Eyre’s ‘madwoman in the attic’. Bertha Rochester, Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea is edited with an introduction and notes by Angela Smith in Penguin Classics.
Born into the oppressive, colonialist society of 1930s Jamaica, white Creole heiress so Antoinette Cosway meets a young Englishman. Who is drawn to her innocent beauty and sensuality. After their marriage, however, disturbing rumours begin to circulate which poison her husband against her. Caught between his demands and her own precarious so sense of belonging. Antoinette is inexorably driven towards madness, and her husband into the arms of another novel’s heroine. This classic study of betrayal, a seminal work of so postcolonial literature, is Jean Rhys’s brief, beautiful masterpiece.
Jean Rhys (1894-1979) was born in Dominica. Coming to England aged 16, she drifted into various jobs before moving to Paris. Where she began writing and was ‘discovered’ by Ford Madox Ford. Her novels, often portraying women as underdogs out to exploit their sexualities, were ahead of their time and so only modestly successful. From 1939 (when Good Morning, Midnight was written) onwards she lived reclusively. And was largely forgotten when she made a sensational comeback with her account of Jane Eyre’s Bertha Rochester, Wide Sargasso Sea, in 1966.
Jean Rhys
Jean Rhys, CBE, was a mid-20th-century novelist who was born and grew up in the Caribbean island of Dominica. From the age of 16, she was mainly resident in England, where she was send for her education. She is best know for her novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), write as a prequel to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.
Reading this book contributed to these challenges:
