Product Description

The fortieth anniversary reissue of the best-selling "tour de force" (Walter Allen, New York Times Book Review).

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.

A sensual and protected young woman, Antoinette Cosway grows upin the lush natural world of the Caribbean. She is sold intomarriage to the coldhearted and prideful Rochester, who succumbsto his need for money and his lust. Yet he will make her pay forher ancestors' sins of slaveholding, excessive drinking, and nihilistic despair by enslaving her as a prisoner in his bleak English home.

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3793 in Books
• Published on: 1992-08-19
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

Amazon.com
In 1966 Jean Rhys reemerged after a long silence with a novel called Wide Sargasso Sea. Rhys had enjoyed minor literary success in the 1920s and '30s with a series of evocative novels featuring women protagonists adrift in Europe, verging on poverty, hoping to be saved by men. By the '40s, however, her work was out of fashion, too sad for a world at war. And Rhys herself was often too sad for the world--she was suicidal, alcoholic, troubled by a vast loneliness. She was also a great writer, despite her powerful self-destructive impulses.

Wide Sargasso Sea is the story of Antoinette Cosway, a Creole heiress who grew up in the West Indies on a decaying plantation. When she comes of age she is married off to an Englishman, and he takes her away from the only place she has known--a house with a garden where "the paths were overgrown and a smell of dead flowers mixed with the fresh living smell. Underneath the tree ferns, tall as forest tree ferns, the light was green. Orchids flourished out of reach or for some reason not to be touched."

The novel is Rhys's answer to Jane Eyre. Charlotte Brontë's book had long haunted her, mostly for the story it did not tell--that of the madwoman in the attic, Rochester's terrible secret. Antoinette is Rhys's imagining of that locked-up woman, who in the end burns up the house and herself. Wide Sargasso Sea follows her voyage into the dark, both from her point of view and Rochester's. It is a voyage charged with soul-destroying lust. "I watched her die many times," observes the new husband. "In my way, not in hers. In sunlight, in shadow, by moonlight, by candlelight. In the long afternoons when the house was empty."

Rhys struggled over the book, enduring rejections and revisions, wrestling to bring this ruined woman out of the ashes. The slim volume was finally published when she was 70 years old. The critical adulation that followed, she said, "has come too late." Jean Rhys died a few years later, but with Wide Sargasso Sea she left behind a great legacy, a work of strange, scary loveliness. There has not been a book like it before or since. Believe me, I've been searching. --Emily White

The Nation
Working a stylistic range from moody introspection to formal elegance, Miss Rhys has us traveling under Antoinette's skin.

The New York Times
A triumph of atmosphere—of what one is tempted to call Caribbean Gothic atmosphere….It has an almost hallucinatory quality.

Customer Reviews

moods as varied as the skies over the West Indies
With her vivid imaginative skills, Jean Rhys offers us the tale of "Bertha" Rochester, the madwoman in the attic of "Jane Eyre." The skies of the West Indies are an ever-changing backdrop in this moody novel of fear, memory, and desire. Rhys' style challenges the reader to "fill in the blanks" many times throughout, making necessary intuitive connections to amplify her sometimes sparse prose. What could have been merely a lightweight story of "love and greed in the tropics" turns into an engaging, beautifully unfolding narrative laden with mystery and sadness.

Greatest tragedy in the world: loss of three trees in North Carolina for the purpose of the novel
I bought this novel with anticipation of a thrilling story and a dramatic yet suspenseful story. What I got was a boring love story followed by an atrocious climb to a lackluster climax. The story is narrator from opposing views, mainly the Creole protagonist, Antionnette, yet also from a Colonialist whose name is never mentioned. Why the name was never mentioned is unclear, obviously to try and give a sense of imagination and creativity to the story (EPIC FAIL). Characters are introduced randomly and seemingly without a purpose in the novel. The racism towards English is evident in Rhys obsession towards depicting them as soulless colonial butchers when this is obviously not the case. The novel is simply a silly novel, not bad, but silly. The love story seemingly falls apart out of nowhere, there is no cohesion to the story and the characters seemingly were created out of a Jamacain woman's desire for a popular story. The climax of the novel is pointless and silly, the story translating to England out of nowhere. There is no point to the novel, as it should never have been written. This is the most racist and atrociously silly novel I have ever read. Couldn't stop laughing after I read it.

The Mystery Woman
Who is the mad woman in the attic of the house where Jane Eyre has gone to work; how does she come to live there; what drove her to madness? Anyone who has read "Jane Eyre" has, I'm sure, wondered these things as Bronte's story unfolded.

Jean Rhys has wondered also, but has tried to answer these questions. The back story which is contained in "Wide Sargasso Sea" fills in answers. Rhys explains the childhood of this woman and her strange home life as a child. The story is told of how she got to England and ended up captive in a dark cagelike attic.

It would have been better if Bronte had answered these questions herself. However, Rhys stands in for her and has written a marvelous mystery which keeps the reader as spellbound as the original story did.

Good reading - have a go at it.