History and Mystery Reads

Rating: 9/10

• Accuracy: Sharp on post-emancipation Jamaica and Dominica, especially the precarious position of impoverished white Creole families after 1834.
• Readability: Short, lyrical and oblique; the shifts in narrator demand attention.
• Plot: The early life of Antoinette Cosway, from a ruined Jamaican estate to marriage with an unnamed Englishman and the attic at Thornfield.

In Jane Eyre, Bertha Mason is the madwoman in the attic, a violent obstacle to Jane’s happiness. Jean Rhys, who grew up in Dominica, wanted to give her a history. Wide Sargasso Sea is that history.

Antoinette Cosway grows up in Jamaica in the 1830s, after the abolition of slavery. Her family, former slave owners, are ruined and despised by both the Black population and the English. Their estate, Coulibri, is burned. Her mother goes mad. Antoinette is married off to an Englishman who wants her money, and they honeymoon in a remote house in Dominica.

The middle section is narrated by the husband, never named but clearly Rochester. His growing fear and resentment, his sense of being overwhelmed by the landscape and by his wife’s sensuality, are brilliantly rendered. Through him, the novel shows how colonial power and male power work together to make a woman ‘mad’.

Rhys’s prose is spare, sensory and fractured. The island landscape is lush and threatening. Christophine, Antoinette’s nurse and a practitioner of obeah, is one of the book’s strongest characters.

Rhys had been largely forgotten for decades, and this novel brought her back. It is also a landmark of postcolonial literature, rewriting a classic from the margins.

The only limit is brevity; some readers want more. The 9 reflects a haunting, compressed masterpiece that changes how you read Jane Eyre and how you think about who gets to tell history.