Wide Sargasso Sea (Norton Critical Editions)

by JudithLRaiskin (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  1999

  $3.47

  Textual notes illuminate the novel's historical background, regional references, and the non-translated Creole and French phrases necessary to fully understand this powerful story. Backgrounds includes a wealth of material on the novel's long evolution, it connections to Jane Eyre, and Rhys's biographical impressions of growing up in Dominica. Criticism introduces readers to the critical debates inspired by the novel with a Derek Walcott poem and eleven essays.

• Used

  Paperback
  1970

  $3.47

• New

  Paperback
  2000

  $10.63

  Her grand attempt to tell what she felt was the story of Jane Eyre's 'madwoman in the attic', Bertha Rochester, Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea is edited with an introduction and notes by Angela Smith in Penguin Classics . Born into the oppressive, colonialist society of 1930s Jamaica, white Creole heiress Antoinette Cosway meets a young Englishman who is drawn to her innocent beauty and sensuality. After their marriage, however, disturbing rumours begin to circulate which poison her husband against her. Caught between his demands and her own precarious sense of belonging, Antoinette is inexorably driven towards madness, and her husband into the arms of another novel's heroine. This classic study of betrayal, a seminal work of postcolonial literature, is Jean Rhys' brief, beautiful masterpiece. Jean Rhys (1894-1979) was born in Dominica. Coming to England aged 16, she drifted into various jobs before moving to Paris, where she began writing and was 'discovered' by Ford Madox Ford. Her novels, often portraying women as underdogs out to exploit their sexualities, were ahead of their time and only modestly successful. From 1939 (when Good Morning, Midnight was written) onwards she lived reclusively, and was largely forgotten when she made a sensational comeback with her account of Jane Eyre's Bertha Rochester, Wide Sargasso Sea , in 1966. If you enjoyed Wide Sargasso Sea , you might like Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre , also available in Penguin Classics . She took one of the works of genius of the nineteenth century and turned it inside-out to create one of the works of genius of the twentieth century . (Michele Roberts, The Times ).