Modern Classics Wide Sargasso Sea

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One of the BBC’s ‘100 Novels That Shaped Our World’

‘Rhys took one of the works of genius of the 19th Century and turned it inside-out to create one of the works of genius of the 20th Century’ Michele Roberts

Jean Rhys’s masterpiece tells the story of Jane Eyre’s ‘madwoman in the attic’, Bertha Rochester.

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’s brief, beautiful masterpiece.

Edited with an introduction and notes by Angela SmithRhys took one of the works of genius of the 19th Century and turned it inside-out to create one of the works of genius of the 20th Century—Michele Roberts

Rhys’s iconic prequel to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is rich in motifs and devices both modernist and postmodernist—Hephzibah Anderson

Beautiful and subversive […] the novel didn’t just take inspiration from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, it illuminated and confronted it, challenged the narrative.—Danielle McLaughlin, Paris Review

Wide Sargasso Sea is not just a great novel, it is many brilliant books in one—IndependentJean Rhys was born in Dominica in 1894. After arriving in England aged sixteen, she became a chorus girl and drifted between different jobs before moving to Paris, where she started to write in the late 1920s. She published a story collection and four novels, after which she disappeared from view and lived reclusively for many years. In 1966 she made a sensational comeback with her masterpiece, Wide Sargasso Sea, written in difficult circumstances over a long period. Rhys died in 1979.GB

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