![]() Instead of a shrieking specter, we get a psychologically nuanced portrayal of Antoinette (Bertha) Mason, a young white Creole girl coming of age in Jamaica while it was still a British colony. Wide Sargasso Sea isn't just a prequel, but a significant re-writing of one of the classics of Victorian fiction. Nearly fifty years later, Rhys turned the story of Brontë's "madwoman in the attic" into a full-length novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, which pretty much established Rhys as one of the greatest novelists in the twentieth century. As a native of the Caribbean herself, she was "shocked" by Brontë's portrayal of Bertha Mason, Rochester's Creole wife who was locked up in the attic ( Rhys 1999: 144). ![]() Jean Rhys first read Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre in 1907, when she arrived in England as a teenager. OK, so we were kidding about the monkeys, but all that other stuff? It's all in Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, and it's widely considered a literary classic. Zombies! Black magic! Riots! Rum-soaked Caribbean honeymoon! Squishy bugs! Monkeys! ![]()
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