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This novel makes us understand how Bertha Rochester / Antoinette Cosway got to be who she was.

Rochester (Bertha), who readers might find fearsome, even monstrous.

Nonetheless, for devotees of J ane Eyre, it imaginatively portrays the character of Mrs. Wide Sargasso Sea isn’t “fan fiction” in the modern sense, since it can stand alone as a reading experience. The slim novel is a response to J ane Eyre, and quite sympathetic to Antoinette (who Rochester begins to call “Bertha,” after her mentally ill mother). In this best-selling novel, Rhys portrays a society so driven by hatred, so skewed in its sexual relations, that it can literally drive a woman out of her mind.” Jean Rhys’s reputation was made upon the publication of this passionate and heartbreaking novel, in which she brings into the light one of fiction’s most mysterious characters: the madwoman in the attic from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Yet he will make her pay for her ancestors’ sins of slaveholding, excessive drinking, and nihilistic despair by enslaving her as a prisoner in his bleak British home. “She is sold into marriage to the coldhearted and prideful Rochester, succumbs to his need for money and his lust. Norton edition describes the heart of the story: When slavery was abolished in Dominica and Jamaica in 1833, they lost their fortune. How Antoinette Cosway became Bertha RochesterĪntoinette Cosway, the story’s protagonist, is the daughter of white, slave-owning Creoles.

It was the novel that rescued Rhys’s flagging reputation. Wide Sargasso Sea became her most successful novel, praised for its spare yet evocative language and its exploration of the power imbalance between men in women, between patriarchal colonizers and the original inhabitants of the Caribbean in the 1830s. When Wide Sargasso Sea was published in 1966, Rhys had all but disappeared from the literary scene her previous novel, Good Morning, Midnight, was published in 1939. Considered a prequel and response to Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, the novella presents the perspective of Antoinette Cosway, the sensual Creole heiress who wound up as the “madwoman in the attic.” Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys is the last work by this Dominican-British author.