Wide Sargasso Sea

Wide Sargasso Sea is a 1966 novel by the Dominican-British writer Jean Rhys and a prequel to Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. Rhys takes the figure Bronte called Bertha Mason, the madwoman in the attic, and gives her a history: a Creole heiress named Antoinette Cosway, whose Jamaican childhood after the abolition of slavery explains how she came to be married to an Englishman and taken to England.

The novel is divided between two narrators. Antoinette describes growing up on an estate her family can no longer afford, the hostility of the community around her and the convent school where she is sent; her husband, who is never named, describes his arrival in a country he does not understand, the marriage arranged for him, and his mounting distrust of his wife and of everyone who speaks to him about her.

Rhys drew on her own memories of growing up in Dominica and worked on the book for years before it appeared. The result is a short novel in a dense, rhythmic prose that shifts between voices, and its subject is the distance between the way Antoinette sees her own life and the story later told about her elsewhere.