Wide Sargasso Sea (Penguin Essentials) [Paperback]

In this beautifully-written, passionate and intelligent book, Jean Rhys writes back to Jane Eyre, inverting the patterns of that book and turning `the madwoman in the attic' from silenced object of other people's discourse to a woman with a voice and subjectivity of her own.

In three parts, this fragmentary and intensely poetic novel gives us Antoinette's difficult childhood as a Creole (neither quite `white' not `black'), a middle narrative from Mr Rochester telling of their marriage, and a short final part from Antoinette again (now re-named Bertha) from her imprisonment in the attic.

Like Rhys' other books, this give a voice to a traditionally muted female character but she overlays the gender concerns with an interest in a colonial legacy. The idea of the `Other' is shown to be simultaneously constructed in terms of race, gender, class and `normality' (though whether Antoinette is `mad' or not is certainly questioned by the text).

That said, Rhys doesn't make this a predictable book and is most contrary, I think, in the central section where Rochester falls deeply under the spell of Antoinette - and it is her very effect on him which he perhaps finds most threatening.

So this is a very modern re-writing of a well-loved book, de-centreing the story of Jane Eyre and forcing us to see it anew. It is also a text which lends itself very well to postcolonial and gendered readings - highly recommended.

"Wide Sargasso Sea" was initially published by Jean Rhys in 1966. The novel functions, brilliantly, as a prequel of sorts to famed British 19th century novelist Charlotte Bronte's proto-feminist book Jane Eyre. However, Rhys has shifted the action of her book from the 1810s, in which Bronte's was set, to the 1830s, shortly after the emancipation of the slaves in Great Britain and the British Empire. SARGASSO tells the unhappy back story of West Indian heiress Bertha Mason, as she was to be known in her later life; she was to be the first Mrs. Rochester, the madwoman in the attic whom Jane Eyre must defeat in order to become the second Mrs. Rochester.

Surely, in the history of Western literature, there can have been few more inspired ideas than that of Rhys's: to develop the tragic kernel at the heart of JANE EYRE and few writers better equipped to do so. For Rhys was the daughter of a Welsh doctor who'd gone to the West Indies, and a third-generation Creole woman of Scottish descent. The author was born Ella Gwendolin Rees Williams, in 1890, in Roseau, Domenica, British West Indies. Rhys knew her homeland well; its snobbish, repressive, patriarchal culture; and the uneasy social position of the Creole woman, who was generally understood to be not necessarily entirely of white ancestry, but was merely accepted as such as a matter of social necessity. (The expression "West Indian white," also meaning one who was not necessarily quite white, was also current at the time.) These women, as you can imagine, had an uneasy relationship with the blacks of the Islands; several of whom find a chance to tell Mr. Rochester that all Creole women are crazy. (And, at one point in the story, a servant calls Mason a "white cockroach," a slur that I understand was frequently directed at Rhys herself in her early life.) This dichotomy will, of course, create tensions that will be difficult for such women to handle, and can be seen as a major cause of Mason's later madness; in addition to the fact that she has been taken away from her homeland to England, as she thought she wished. And she hates the cold grayness of that country, and fails to understand Rochester, or the English, properly.

SARGASSO runs less than 200 pages, and has not an extra word in it. (All of Rhys' works are terse). At any rate, Part I of SARGASSO opens in the Caribbean, with Antoinette Cosway, the sensual young woman who is to be sold into marriage with Rochester. The author's descriptive writing here, on the flora and fauna, the social and economic lives of the Islands, is simply outstanding, passionate and powerful, almost hallucinatory. Part II gives us Rochester in the Caribbean: at one point, he says he has come to hate the Islands so much that he "would give [his] eyes never to have seen this abominable place." (And those of us familiar with JANE EYRE will know that the first Mrs. Rochester will, indeed, cost him his eyes.) In Part III we see the unhappy Bertha Rochester, as she is now known, become the madwoman in the attic of his English home.

Bronte is, to be sure, widely esteemed as a proto-feminist author these days; so is Rhys, as are all her works, but most particularly SARGASSO, and its heart-wrenching tale of a woman at sea in an alien, hostile culture. As a writer, Rhys had fallen silent for many years, mid-career, until publishing SARGASSO. The novel won the prestigious W.H. Smith Literary Award, also the Royal Society Literary Award. She said about it all: "It has come too late." She was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1966, and a Commander of the British Empire in 1978, a year before her death.

This book is simply genious. You will never read Jane Eyre in the same way again.
The writing is fantastic, the story is compelling and it can't even be compared to the bad film version of it.

If you are thinking about reading it... Do!