It also reveals unpalatable truths behind the respectable facade of the English gentry – subtly reminding us, for example, that Rochester’s fortune, like that of many another English gentleman, was built on his marriage to an heiress and ultimately on the slave trade. It opens up an exotic world and plumbs the depths of the subconscious. This novella-length book is incredibly complex and wide-ranging.

She determined to give Rochester’s wife an identity and a voice.īut, in doing so, she did much more. Rhys was ‘shocked’ at her first reading of Jane Eyre: she knew all about mad Creole heiresses, and the way they were exploited by everyone.

It is certainly post-colonialist and post-feminist. The result, first published in 1966, was a brilliant novel that is possibly one of the earliest post-modernist works in English, although Rhys is always described as a modernist. But eventually she was happy enough with a draft to send it to her assiduous editor, Francis Wyndham. Reading her letters, it is clear that she had revisited an old idea and that she procrastinated, and probably prevaricated, for some years about the progress of the book. Some stories she had written in the interim were published, and she claimed she was working on the manuscript that would become Wide Sargasso Sea. In 1958, following a BBC dramatisation of the novel, she was rediscovered (most people had thought she was dead). Subject to depression and alcoholism, Rhys stopped writing for almost 20 years after the publication of her fifth book Good Morning, Midnight, in 1939. Her books are full of her sense of otherness, usually from the autobiographical point of view of women who are grudgingly dependent on unreliable men. Later, displaced and alienated, after living the life of a demi-mondaine, she began to write. She went to England at 16 to finish her education. She was, like many children of colonialists, minded and nurtured by black servants. Jean Rhys was born in Dominica of a Welsh father and a Creole mother. It traces the life of Rochester’s wife, Antoinette, from before she became the mad woman in the attic and up to the time of the fire at Thornfield Hall that left Rochester blinded and physically debilitated, able at last to marry Jane. Wide Sargasso Sea writes back to Jane Eyre as a prequel. You don’t need to have read Jane Eyre to love Wide Sargasso Sea, but if you have, you will never think of it in the same way again.

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys