Wide Sargasso Sea

I just watched a 1993 movie adaptation of this book and now have to purchase a copy and read this author's character exploration in one of my favorite books Jane Eyre. Please read below:


Wide Sargasso Sea


First edition cover
Author Jean Rhys
Language English
Genre(s) Postmodern Novel
Publisher Deutsch (UK) & W. W. Norton (USA)
Publication date October 1966
Media type print (hardback & paperback)


Pages 192 pp
ISBN 0-233-95866-5


Wide Sargasso Sea is a 1966 postcolonial parallel novel by Dominica-born author Jean Rhys. Since her previous work, Good Morning, Midnight, was published in 1939, Rhys had lived in obscurity. Wide Sargasso Sea put Rhys into the limelight once more, and became her most successful novel.

The novel acts as a prequel to Charlotte Brontë's famous 1847 novel Jane Eyre. It is the story of the first Mrs. Rochester, Antoinette (Bertha) Mason, a white Creole heiress, from the time of her youth in the Caribbean to her unhappy marriage and relocation to England. Caught in an oppressive patriarchal society in which she belongs neither to the white Europeans nor the black Jamaicans, Rhys' novel re-imagines Brontë's devilish madwoman in the attic. As with many postcolonial works, the novel deals largely with the themes of racial inequality and the harshness of displacement and assimilation.