Wide Sargasso Sea

Wide Sargasso Sea is a novel by the Dominica-born British writer Jean Rhys, published in 1966, conceived as a prequel to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre that gives a voice and history to Bertha Mason, the madwoman confined in Rochester's attic in that novel. Set in Jamaica and Dominica in the years after the abolition of slavery, the novel follows Antoinette Cosway, a white Creole heiress whose troubled marriage to an unnamed Englishman, closely modeled on Brontë's Rochester, unravels amid his growing suspicion and cultural alienation, his renaming of her as Bertha, and his eventual removal of her to England, where the novel's final section shows her imprisoned and driven toward the fire that closes Jane Eyre. Rhys wrote the novel to reclaim Bertha from Brontë's portrayal of her as a mute, animalistic obstacle, giving Antoinette a colonial Caribbean history of racial and economic displacement between the white Creole planter class and the newly freed Black population that Rhys presents as central to her eventual breakdown. Published after decades in which Rhys had largely disappeared from literary life, Wide Sargasso Sea revived her reputation and is now widely read both as a major postcolonial and feminist novel in its own right and as an essential companion text to Jane Eyre.