Helpful Score: 4
A spirited and sensual young woman grows up on a plantation in Jamaica just after the British government has freed the slaves. Her father has died years before and she, her handicapped brother, and her mother must try to keep up appearances until her mother can find a new husband. A new marriage brings a few years of happiness, but sudden, unexpected violence drives the mother into a deep depression and ends up forcing the girl into an arranged marriage with an Englishman who wants her fortune. The Englishman is Rochester; the Mr. Rochester of 'Jane Eyre'. And the girl slowly becomes the 'mad woman in the attic' of Bronte's beloved classic.
Beautifully written, with an engaging heroine and an interesting story, this book suggests that the withdrawal of love and choice can lead to the destruction of a soul as surely as violence.
Beautifully written, with an engaging heroine and an interesting story, this book suggests that the withdrawal of love and choice can lead to the destruction of a soul as surely as violence.
Helpful Score: 3
This is a prequel to _Jane Eyre_ by Charlotte Bronte. It imagines the life and character of Rochester's first wife, driven to madness. This book is very intense and sensual. I was not able to fully appreciate it until I read a reader's commentary on the book- which I would highly recommend.
Helpful Score: 3
A rather dark exploration of how Mr. Rochester's wife in Jane Eyre might have become mad. Interesting to read if you're a Jane Eyre fan.
Helpful Score: 2
Pay attention! The book is written in the first person singular, but there are two first persons: the heroine (the first Mrs. Rochester from Jane Eyre) and her husband. Sometimes you have to read an entire section before you know which of them is the narrator. Its interesting how lucidly the heroine relates her tale, even though we know, as this is a sort of prequel, that she is insane. In fact, the final part is narrated by her at the time that she is insane and confined in Thornfield Hall in Charlotte Brontes Jane Eyre. Quite a feat that! That it is largely set in the Caribbean is easy to identify, but the Introduction refines it as Jamaica and Dominica. After Part One, I kept getting them confused; maybe because I couldnt keet the narrator straight. But, hey, thats me! Anyway, for you Jane Eyre stalwarts, here is your opportunity to discover how the first Mrs. Rochester became deranged. And, you can hear it mostly in her own words.
Helpful Score: 2
From Amazon:
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.
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.
