Jean Rhys’ novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) is the best-known work of an author who struggled throughout her life with disappointment, relationships, poverty and issues of race, sex, aesthetics and identity.

            The prequel to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, written over a century before, Rhys’ short novel traces the journey of Antoinette Cosway, the future infamous Madwoman in the Attic. Antoinette is destined to become Bertha, the woman who will stand between Jane Eyre’s initial happiness with Mr. Rochester and set Thornfield Manor and herself ablaze in a last defiant act. Wide Sargasso Sea embodies tension between luxurious Jamaica and dreary England, between the flaming personality of Antoinette Cosway and the repressed Edward Rochester. The match is ultimately disastrous and Rochester reacts the only way he knows how to, ultimately restricting his wife with coldness and control. It is all that a woman like Antoinette can expect under Victorian Empirism; she is coached into madness by her mother, the racial tensions in post-Emancipation Jamaica, and by the rigidity of her estranged husband, but she has left her mark both on England, and through the corridors of the canon of English literature.  

            The result of a British Literature Class assignment, this site is designed to delve further into the biography and mind of Jean Rhys who created an imaginative work which, though feeding off of Brontë’s creation, can firmly stand on its own two legs in terms of re-creation and re-definition. Please navigate through the various pages which explain the history and cultural milieu of Jamaica in which Rhys’ novel is set, the biography of Jean Rhys, a textual analysis of Rhys’ novel, comparison’s with Bronte’s novel, an analysis of the cinematic adaptation based on the novel, a brief picture gallery and a references list.