I went to parts of Coulibri that I had not seen, where there was no road, no path, no track. That we know how her story ends makes reading this book all the more tragic. But her prescience doesn’t matter in the end.

Antoinette is a character who we get to know inside and out - she feels deeply, she observes carefully, and, significantly, she fears all the right things.

The book is a fragmented, haunting experience that does a beautiful job of evoking both interior and exterior landscapes with spare and precise prose.

Rochester (unnamed in this book), and eventual relocation to England and incarceration in Thornfield Hall. Named for her widowed mother Annette, Antoinette’s story is told through her childhood, adolescence, marriage to Mr. In Wide Sargasso Sea, Bertha Mason is reinvented as Antoinette Cosway. I thought I’d try to write her a life.” -Jean Rhys When I read Jane Eyre as a child, I thought, why should she think Creole women are lunatics and all that? What a shame to make Rochester’s first wife, Bertha, the awful madwoman, and I immediately thought I’d write the story as it might really have been. When interviewed by Elizabeth Vreeland for The Paris Review in 1979, she said: It is understandable that she would identify with the character of Bertha Mason and want to push back against Brontë’s colonial, degrading tropes. Rhys was raised and schooled in Dominica until she was 16, at which point she was sent to England to live with an aunt.īy all accounts she hated England and never felt at home there. During this time, “Creole” was a term used to describe anyone born on the island, no matter if their ancestry was African or European. Born in 1890 in the Caribbean island of Dominica, Rhys was the daughter of a Welsh doctor and a third-generation white Creole mother. Bertha is never given a voice in Jane Eyre. Rochester’s first wife (Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre), the iconic “madwoman in the attic.” Published in 1966 (119 years after Brontë’s novel), Wide Sargasso Sea is a reimagining of Bertha and a reckoning with the way Jane Eyre others and dehumanizes her - she is described in Brontë’s novel as beastlike, maniacal, inherently bad and yet also implicated in her own badness. The book is a beautiful, complicated wonder. On the heels of my Brontë reading extravaganza, I finally picked up Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea and pushed through the sad animal deaths in the beginning chapters.

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