Wide Sargasso Sea
Wide Sargasso Sea is Jean Rhys's 1966 novel, written across more than two decades and conceived as a response to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. Rhys, born in Dominica in 1890 to a Welsh-Scottish doctor and a third-generation white Creole mother, had read Jane Eyre as a child and been outraged by Brontë's brief, faceless treatment of the madwoman in the attic. The novel that resulted gives Bertha Mason her real name, Antoinette Cosway, and her own life. Part one is told in Antoinette's voice, opening on the burning of her family's plantation Coulibri after Emancipation and the long financial decline that pushes her widowed mother into a marriage of convenience. Part two passes to the unnamed young Englishman, modeled on Brontë's Mr Rochester, who has been sent to Jamaica to marry her for a settlement and who slowly, methodically replaces her name and her language with his own. Part three returns to Antoinette in the cold attic at Thornfield Hall.
Themes & atmosphere
Also by Jean Rhys
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What you might want to know about Wide Sargasso Sea
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
After the 1833 Emancipation Act ruins her family, young Creole heiress Antoinette Cosway grows up at the rotting Coulibri estate in Jamaica with her widowed mother Annette.
Yes. Jean Rhys reimagined the backstory of Bertha Mason, the woman in the attic in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, set in 1830s Jamaica and Dominica.
It is short but dense, with shifting narrators and a Caribbean Creole register that asks for slow reading. Most editions are under 200 pages.
Wide Sargasso Sea was written by Jean Rhys, published in 1966 by Penguin.
Wide Sargasso Sea is 189 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Wide Sargasso Sea takes most readers 3 to 4 hours to finish.
Wide Sargasso Sea is a standalone novel by Jean Rhys, not part of a series.
Wide Sargasso Sea is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.