Breakfast at Tiffany's Truman Capote. Brideshead Revisited Evelyn Waugh. The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald. On the Road Jack Kerouac. The Plague Albert Camus.
The History of Love Nicole Krauss. Cold Comfort Farm Stella Gibbons. Goodbye to All That Robert Graves. Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad. The Pursuit of Love Nancy Mitford. Dubliners James Joyce. The Day of the Triffids John Wyndham. A Month in the Country J. Villages John Updike. About the Author. Jean Rhys Jean Rhys was born in Dominica in Must-read books by women, as chosen by our readers. Reading remedy: books to read if you're heartbroken. Sign up to the Penguin Newsletter For the latest books, recommendations, author interviews and more.
Please enter an email. Please enter a valid email address. Words dripping with sensuousness and descriptions like you are reading a painting. Although the readers who haven't read Eyre will feel a little lost, only a little. On the brighter side, it gives you an impetus to read another Classic.
Kritika D. Pramit Sarkar Certified Buyer. Though I didn't like the paper cover, the book is an excellent choice. Flipkart Customer Certified Buyer.
Shubham Tari Certified Buyer. Laxmipriya Soren Certified Buyer. A very unsettling novel to read.. The book leaves one disturbed in an insidious way.. Puja Tunga Certified Buyer. Questions and Answers. Q: Is this contain text? Flipkart Customer. Reading challenge: 27, 1 of 2. View all 77 comments. Shelves: classics , , clothbound-wishlist. Beware of a few Jane Eyre spoilers if you've managed to live your life so far without a reading it, or b knowing what happens. Now, I have read Jan Beware of a few Jane Eyre spoilers if you've managed to live your life so far without a reading it, or b knowing what happens.
And I do appreciate the original idea behind Jean Rhys ' novel. The mad woman in Mr Rochester's attic had a story to tell, it has long bothered feminists and other critics how this character was portrayed in Jane Eyre because, at the end of the day, this mad woman was a person with a history - or should have been - not just a little crazy puppet there to pop up and throw a spanner in the works when Jane and Mr Rochester finally got together.
Rhys wanted to give her the past that Bronte didn't, and she also wanted to show her decline into madness so the reader could appreciate who she was and where she came from and why she ended up the way she did.
I just don't think it was handled very well and I didn't like the writing style at all. The narrative relies upon dream-like visions, fragmented impressions, incomplete sentences, and multiple first-person voices to create an overall sense of disorientation in the reader I'd say "complete bewilderment" is more accurate than "disorientation".
I find that I can't appreciate this feeling of being drugged up to my eyeballs when reading a book, though I know many readers look on it favourably. It's more trippy than beautiful to me. Plus, I think the attempts to show how she became mad were a failure. When this is a book about a woman who falls into madness because she distrusts her husband and their relationship is falling apart.
I appreciate that it isn't feminism if the woman is always strong and never makes mistakes, but she basically crumbles because her husband doesn't give her enough attention. Not very believable, and not very pro-woman either. View all 16 comments. I read this book years ago and loved it as much as Jane Eyre of which this book was the prequel. I also wrote a review years ago but it not only disappeared, the edition was changed. How do these things happen? There is very little about the book in the following.
But quite a bit about Dominica and Sargasso and a little of Jean Rhys herself. Years ago I used to go to Dominica, I stayed in three places. Firstly was an old Great House in Roseau, the capital, Cherry Orchard which wasn't it's origina I read this book years ago and loved it as much as Jane Eyre of which this book was the prequel. Firstly was an old Great House in Roseau, the capital, Cherry Orchard which wasn't it's original name and was at one time the home of Jean Rhys.
There were nuns staying there too. And the largest horriblest millipede I have ever seen, in the toilet. It wasn't dead, it reared it's head up at me. I went to Laudat as I was into climbing, hill-walking really, we only used ropes once.
That was because the rasta whose guest house I was staying in, One Love, wanted to go to Roseau shopping and it was a long hike on the road but there was a short cut if you went down the mountain, that needed ropes. I didn't know what I was letting myself in for, this was not the sort of life I was used to!
So I hitched a ride back. When I was in Laudat I had a couple of amazing experiences. I trekked to the the Boiling Lake which is a long,hard climb - you can tell when you are getting closer because the air stinks of sulphur. I also went to the Freshwater Lake which was peaceful and apparently sacred to the Carib and Arawak Indians.
When I was there the rasta said he wanted to eat some fresh meat so I thought we were going back to Roseau but no, he strung up a goat into a small tree by it's hind legs and sawed at its throat, the poor creature screaming and blood everywhere I had headphones on, Michael Jackson, but I could still hear it. Then he sliced open its belly and brought out the liver and said he would cook it first. His sister fried it with local herbs, it smelled horrible, old goat and I could not bring myself to even put any on my plate.
I stuck to ground provisions, yam, dasheen, yucca and Irish potatoes. Next day I left. I went to stay in the Carib Reserve with the bwoyfrien's family.
He was half Carib view spoiler [ and half the son of one of the Green's who grandfather had been an engineer on the Panama Canal who had settled in Dominica. His son had children by a lot of women, Black, White and Carib, he could afford it! But all the children loved him and got a university education if they wanted it. I stayed in a simple wooden house. The first night I had salt fish with roast breadfruit cooked on an open fire. It was amazing. Next day we picked cocoa pods and threw the pink beans on a big mat on the ground to dry in the sun and ferment.
The cocoa beans were surrounded by white 'cottonwool' which was delicious and juicy and lemony, a real surprise. Every day we raked the beans until they were brown, then they were ground up and formed into hard balls mixed with cinnamon and nutmeg to grate for hot chocolate.
At night I read the book by the light of an oil lamp. I could relate to the book from Jean Rhys's life. Antoinette was neither really Jamaican or European. Jean was in a similar situation.
She didn't get on with her mother, her father was harsh, she spoke Kweyol,tthe local French patois as well as English, but was not really accepted by the Blacks. Sent to the UK for schooling at 16, she didn't fit in there any better and was mocked for her accent and less than standard English.
She wasn't rich, destined to be a debutante, but was expected to return to the island and marry another white Dominican, which she didn't want to do. Nowhere did she fit in, and that is Antoinette too.
Antoinette went mad, and Jean became bad - a chorus girl, a prostitute, a kept woman and then The wide Sargasso Sea seems to be expanding. It can totally cover a beach and be as deep as up to your knees. And it stinks, it stinks worse than the Boiling Lake. Rotting vegetation, rotting eggs, it's really nasty and since every single year it has drifted all over the Caribbean stinking up the shoreline, no one knows why.
It has to be dredged, raked and trucked away. Then all of a sudden, the season will be over and everything is ok, back to the clear waters and fresh breezes and we forget all about the stink of the sargasso.
I wonder if Dominica had this awful plague back in Jean Rhys's time she'd have changed the title of her book? Written 14th June since the original review and correct edition disappeared View all 19 comments.
Jul 27, Jaidee impromptu road trip-only upd progress rated it it was amazing Recommends it for: those that like their literature poetic and nebulous. Recommended to Jaidee impromptu road trip-only upd progress by: a beautiful ex girlfriend as fiery as Antoinette herself. Shelves: five-stars-books. View all 47 comments. My crops are flourishing. My skin is clear.
My grades are up. I couldn't be happier. Wide Sargasso Sea is the gift that keeps on giving, and I will forever be grateful to Jean Rhys for finally doing what needed to be done.
Rochester's marriage from the point-of-view of his "mad wife" Antoinette Cosw My crops are flourishing. Rochester's marriage from the point-of-view of his "mad wife" Antoinette Cosway aka Bertha Mason.
Despite it being my mom's favorite book, I only got interested in the novel after I heard Marlon James gushing about it on his podcast. He said: "In a lot of ways it was a novel that finally slammed the door shut on the 19th century.
You can't read Wide Sargasso Sea and then read Victorian literature with their rose curtains anymore. You realize that these are some nasty hypocritical people who destroy everybody in their way who are not them. Sign me the fuck up! On top of that, I've been getting really interested into the postcolonial literary practice of "writing back" — so postcolonial writers responding to texts in the canon by taking silenced characters from the margins and placing them in the center by giving them a voice and more background in their own narratives, and Wide Sargasso Sea is like the textbook example when it comes to writing back.
In Jane Eyre , Bertha Mason doesn't speak. Not a single word. She doesn't have a voice. All she does is growl and hiss. There are only a few scenes where we can catch a glimpse of her and there are also not that many scenes where she is being talked about. However, as a little refresher, let's look at at how Bertha is portrayed in Jane Eyre. When Rochester's illegal wedding to Jane gets interrupted by an intruder who declares: "The marriage cannot go on: I declare the existence of an impediment.
After a moment of inarticulate fury, Rochester admits that his wife is alive and that in marrying Jane he would have been knowingly taking a second wife. He then proceeds to describe his wife in these charming terms: Bertha Mason is mad; and she came of a mad family; idiots and maniacs through three generations! Her mother, the Creole, was both a madwoman and a drunkard!
Bertha, like a dutiful child, copied her parent in both points. I had a charming partner—pure, wise, modest; you can fancy I was a happy man.
I went through rich scenes! But I owe you no further explanation. Briggs, Wood, Mason, I invite you all to come up to the house and visit Mrs.
Poole's patient, and my wife! You shall see what sort of a being I was cheated into espousing, and judge whether or not I had a right to break the compact, and seek sympathy with something at least human.
As if this wasn't bad enough we then get to see Bertha in action as Rochester orders the crowd to come to Thornfield to see her, to judge for themselves: In the deep shade, at the farther end of the room, a figure ran backwards and forwards. What it was, whether beast or human being, one could not, at first sight, tell: it grovelled, seemingly, on all fours; it snatched and growled like some strange wild animal: but it was covered with clothing, and a quantity of dark, grizzled hair, wild as a mane, hid its head and face.
Here again, Bertha is seen through a colonial gaze and gets thus dehumanised. She is seen as a "beast", a "wild animal" who is devoid of speech. She is perceived as being dangerous, uncontrollable and maniac. A few moments later, Jane describes: "Mr Rochester flung me behind him: the lunatic sprang and grappled his throat viciously, and laid her teeth to his cheek. So, it comes as no surprise that Jean Rhys, a white Creole woman herself, took offense to that portrayal.
She's necessary to the plot, but always she shrieks, howls, laughs horribly, attacks all and sundry - off stage. For me and for you I hope , she must be on stage. She must be at least plausible with a past, the reason why Mr. Rochester treats her so abominably and feels justified, the reason why he thinks she is mad and why of course she goes mad, even the reason why she tries to set everything on fire, and eventually succeeds. Personally, I think that one is simple. She is cold - and fire is the only warmth she knows in England.
Then reread Jane Eyre with your eyes fucking open this time. In addition, Rhys makes a postcolonial argument when she ties Antoinette's husband's eventual rejection of Antoinette to her Creole heritage a rejection shown to be critical to Antoinette's descent into madness.
But Jean Rhys does a lot more than just revising Jane Eyre — she doesn't simply flesh out the characters of the original novel to explain their motivations, she actually intervenes in the very project of the novel and its imposing structure, exposing its historical limitations and its legacy as a product of empire and violence. What Wide Sargasso Sea explores is negotiation of the space between audiences and performers, sanity and madness, expectation and fulfilment, acting and being.
The Sargasso Sea lies between Europe Rochester's home and the West Indies Antoinette's home and is difficult to navigate, like the human situations in the novel. Many vessels have become becalmed or lost in this area of the ocean. Similarly, Antoinette feels lost as she is figuratively caught between England and Jamaica.
She is neither colonial nor Jamaican, but a white Creole. The social and racial currents swirl around her as she searches for stability and identity. I wonder why I have been brought here. For that reason? There must be a reason. What is it that I must do? When I first came I thought it would be for a day, two days, a week perhaps. I thought that when I saw hime and spoke to him I would be wise as serpents, harmless as doves.
When she physically crosses the Sargasso Sea and goes to England she believes the ship had lost its way and that she is not really in England.
She completely loses her identity, which points out how wide the Sargasso Sea has been for Antoinette. What haunts the reader of this text is the knowledge of what will happen to Antoinette, and the sense that secrets are hidden because people do not want to see what they see, or know what they know.
In England, a total rupture occurs in Antoinette's mind; she has been constructed as the mad Creole by Rochester but she does not recognise that self when she sees it, having returned in imagination to the Caribbean world that is shut up in her, as the red dress hangs in the black press smelling of spices. The implication is that the Creoles are classified as inferior in the new society. In this unfamiliar landscape, he tries his best to assert his power over basically every person he meets, but especially over his wife-to-be.
Bertha is not my name. You are trying to make me into someone else, calling me by another name. Even when she threatened me with the bottle she had a marionette equality.
She tell me in the middle of all this you start calling her names. That word mean doll, eh? With the confidence of his belief in his own cultural and racial superiority he has stolen her spirit and driven her mad, but his vindictive account of it is as unhinged as her behaviour.
In Wide Sargasso Sea , Rhys also draws attention to colonialism and the slave trade by which Antoinette's ancestors had made their fortune. The lurking, suggested, but mostly unspeakable secrets of Wide Sargasso Sea are glimpsed but never clearly seen. It is as if both exploiters and exploited want to suppress any record of the humiliation and cruelty of slavery, and yet the landscape is haunted by it.
There is a similar resolute amnesia about the transition from slavery to emancipation, when the white Creoles lost their status in comparison with new arrivals from Britain like Mason. Part of this guilt relates to anxiety about miscegenation. Creole of pure English descent she may be, but they are not English or European either.
I was thirsty for her, but that is not love. I felt very little tenderness for her, she was a stranger to me, a stranger who did not think or feel as I did. Now at last I know why I was brought here and what I have to do. There must have been a draught for the flame flickered and I thought it was out.
But I shielded it with my hand it burned up again to light me along the dark passage. The fire that consumes her is directly linked to the one set by that group of newly freed ex-slaves.
It is an act of resistance, not madness. View all 28 comments. Mar 05, Violet wells rated it really liked it. I've always been convinced I've read Jane Eyre.
I've even rated it here. I also thought I had at some point in my life seen a film adaptation. But the further I ventured into this retelling of Charlotte Bronte's novel the more I found myself doubting the veracity of this assumption. Finally, I had to own up to never having read Jane Eyre. This came as a bit of a shock, as it always does when we discover we have invented a memory.
No doubt I once fibbed, not wanting to embarrass myself as being p I've always been convinced I've read Jane Eyre. No doubt I once fibbed, not wanting to embarrass myself as being poorly read and the fib became a monument, a monument I've even garnished with four-starred flowers.
And if you've never read Jane Eyre this novel is sometimes confusing. It may even be confused. It begins with Antoinette, a young Creole girl whose family on her white father's side have a dubious history of slave-holding.
Slavery has recently been abolished and there's much anger in the air. The racism theme in this novel is for the most part artfully dramatised, especially perhaps the close bond between racism and misogyny. As if you can't have one without the other. Women too can be misogynistic, if they've been browbeaten and brainwashed.
Part one, culminating with the eruption of the violence simmering throughout, is all beautifully observed and compelling. Then we begin part two and I found myself reading three pages which were going completely over my head. I retraced my footsteps and found a footnote. The note at the back of the book informed me the book was now being narrated by Antoinette's new husband.
Should a novel need this kind of note? I recently watched a documentary about Rhys' editor and learned that the first part of this book was added afterwards at her suggestion. Which means Rhys composed the novel in a completely different key. And I'm afraid this shows. I kept feeling Rhys didn't have full control over her material. As if the new beginning had skewed and jarred what followed.
To my mind, the editor should have gone further and told her to now write the entire novel from Antoinette's point of view. The husband narrative, never entirely convincing - what baddie portrays himself as a baddie?
But he's a reliable narrator, too reliable, there essentially to establish facts. It struck me as a laziness in Rhys that, having changed the beginning, she left what follows untouched. And all the best bits of the husband's narrative are when he sounds exactly like Antoinette. That Rhys eventually dumps him for part three and returns to Antoinette does make you wonder why he was ever there in the first place.
She also very clumsily adds a brief third voice in part three which confirmed to me that she gave far more thought to crafting her sentences than she did to structure. It would have demanded a more refined artistry but my feeling was Rhys could have and should have channelled all the information we learn through the husband through Antoinette. What redeems the architectural flaws is how well Rhys writes and how much of interest she has to say about her subject matter.
It's sad if this, as the cover proclaims, is her masterpiece because my feeling is she was more than capable of writing a better novel. The average rating for this is 3.
And I haven't read this three times as this site declares. But I have now read it. Jane Eyre will follow soon. View all 40 comments.
Sep 26, Ahmad Sharabiani rated it really liked it Shelves: fiction , feminism , literature , books , historical , gothic , british , 20th-century. I'd always assumed that Jane was escaping into beautiful avian images, but it turns out that a far more gothic imagination is hidden between the chapters, in a series of sinister miniature engravings.
I got out my old copy of Jane Eyre, and there was the evidence: "The fiend pinning down the thief's pack behind him"; "the black horned thing seated aloof on a rock, surveying a distant crowd surrounding a gallows. How had I never noticed this before? Could it be that the poor little orphan of my memory was harbouring vengeful fantasies? Had I all along been mistaking a gothic character for a Dickensian one? It's with assumptions such as this that Jean Rhys plays in her fabulously atmospheric exploration of the life of the first Mrs Rochester.
Antoinette Conway is an orphan, too, as a Creole heiress marooned in Jamaica, in the ruins of a slaving culture that has made her a pariah to her black neighbours.
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