Wide Sargasso Sea is a 1966 postcolonial novel by Dominica-born British author Jean Rhys. It is both a prequel and response to Charlotte Brontë's noted novel Jane Eyre (1847), describing the background to the first marriage of Mr. Rochester.
It tells the story of Antoinette Cosway, a Creole heiress, from the time of her youth in Jamaica, to her unhappy marriage to a certain English gentleman—he is never named by the author. Caught in an oppressive patriarchal society in which she fully belongs neither to the Europeans nor the Jamaicans, Antoinette Cosway is Rhys' version of Brontë's devilish "madwoman in the attic."
As with many postcolonial works, the novel deals with the themes of ethnic inequality and the harshness of displacement and assimilation. It is also concerned with power relations between men and women.
(main source en.wikipedia)
Written over the course of twenty-one years and published in 1966, Wide Sargasso Sea, based on Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, takes place in Jamaica and Dominica in 1839-45. 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 include a wealth of material on the novel's long evolution, its 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. - Publisher.
