Recommendations from our site
“My first reaction to what is essentially a prequel to my favourite novel ever was indignation. Like: this is fan fiction, at best. But then I read it, and I was blown away. It felt so transgressive. I didn’t know we could do that! I’ll never forgive Jean Rhys, though, for ruining Mr Rochester for me. I mean, I was so in love with him, growing up. He was my first literary crush. She destroyed him. But her language! It’s so economic. I find it mesmerising. I think she was very underappreciated.” Read more...
Historical Novels Set in the Victorian Era
Virginia Feito, Novelist
“Jean Rhys is a white writer who was born in the colonies, and later moved to Britain. Wide Sargasso Sea is a reimagining of Jane Eyre from the perspective of Bertha, Rochester’s first wife. She’s described as a white Creole heiress, with Creole in this context meaning that she is too connected to Caribbean culture to be seen as culturally ‘white’ by the British Rochester. What Jean Rhys does is a post-colonial retelling. She draws out the themes that enable Antoinette to be cast as mad. And this madness is based – a little in Jane Eyre and quite explicitly in Wide Sargasso Sea – in a sense of the Empire as a corrupting space where white people make increasingly bad choices.” Read more...
The best books on British Colonialism
Charlotte Lydia Riley, Historian
