The release and success of the book prompted a huge revival of interest in Rhys’ work and today Wide Sargasso Sea is considered to be one of the greatest novels of the 20th century as well as a foundation text of Postcolonial literature courses around the world. Wrenched from her Caribbean home and subjected to a life of isolation and cruelty in an alien land, Antoinette-whom he renames “Bertha” and confines to a locked room in Thornfield Hall-descends into madness. Rochester-aka Bertha from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.īoth a prequel and a postcolonial response to Brontë’s 1847 novel, Wide Sargasso Sea begins in Jamaica in the aftermath of the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act, which ended slavery in the British Empire. The protagonist, a creole heiress named Antoinette, tells of her life from childhood to her arranged marriage to an unnamed, and increasingly cold Englishman. Wide Sargasso Sea is an astonishing, hallucinatory fantasy about the early life, and eventual psychological disintegration, of the first Mrs. In 1966, after more than a quarter century in obscurity, the Dominica-born British author Jean Rhys published what is now considered to be her masterpiece.
