From the Bookshelf of Never too Late to Read Classics…

Wide Sargasso Sea

Jean Rhys

Start date: August 1, 2018

Finish date: August 31, 2018

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What Members Thought

Jul 20, 2015 Sara rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: modern-classics

Jean Rhys takes us to the West Indies, an environment that is heavy, languid, stifling, and claustrophobic. It is not surprising that people go insane here, what is surprising is that anyone is able to keep their sanity. In this world of mysticism, racial mixtures and moving boundaries, is born the tragedy that becomes the catalyst to one of the greatest love stories of all time. But that is after--this story belongs, not to the governess, but to the wife.

Antoinette Cosway is a girl who is press ...more

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Nov 27, 2021 Anu rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: classics, world, feminism, challenge_travel

It's been touted as the prequel to Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë but I wouldn't have known so if I wasn't told about it. This books stands on it's own and I liked it better than it's so called sequel. Now Wide Sargasso Sea is much more of a gothic novel than Jane Eyre and is far less puritanical.

"It was a song about a white cockroach. That's me. That's what they call all of us who were here before their own people in Africa sold them to the slave traders."

The world of British slave owners in c It's been touted as the prequel to Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë but I wouldn't have known so if I wasn't told about it. This books stands on it's own and I liked it better than it's so called sequel. Now Wide Sargasso Sea is much more of a gothic novel than Jane Eyre and is far less puritanical.

"It was a song about a white cockroach. That's me. That's what they call all of us who were here before their own people in Africa sold them to the slave traders."

The world of British slave owners in colonies such as Jamaica and Trinidad was completely unknown to me. This book opened my eyes to the fraught relationship among the ancestors of these slave owners, the imported slaves and the island locals. At the time that this story takes place, the whites aren't rich anymore, abandoned by the British government, they have become the laughing stock among descendants of the slaves. The story is also a more personal account of the struggles that Antoinette and her mother Annette have with their Creole heritage and their colonialist circumstances in later life.

You can almost smell the wild tropical flowers and feel the humidity and heat on your skin while reading this book. The atmosphere created by Jean Rhys is at once sensuous and oppressive. Antoinette's situation is mirrored by the stifling and still weather that surrounds her. Her descent into madness is beautifully crafted by the author - it chronicles why a young and beautiful woman like her is driven to irrationality and delusions. Others believe that she inherited it from her mother, but society had a far bigger role to play. This descent into chaos and madness is nuanced and convincing. Even Edward Rochester's actions and cruelty are far better explained here. His feelings of loneliness, fear and abandonment give credibility to his incredible emotional abuse but of course does not condone it.

The story is steeped in the mysterious island magic or obeah, nefarious gossip and racial tension. There is this foreboding sense of doom even in the most light-hearted scenes of the book. I wish Jean Rhys' books were easier to find - it took me a year to get my hands on Wide Sargasso Sea. ...more

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