Jean Rhys's spell-binding novel Wide Sargasso Sea, inspired by Jane Eyre and winner the Royal Society of Literature Awardis beautifully repackaged as part of the Penguin Essentials range.
'There is no looking glass here and I don't know what I am like now... Nowthey have taken everything away. What am I doing in this place and who am I?'
If Antoinette Cosway, a spirited Creoleheiress, could have foreseen the terrible future that awaited her, she wouldnot have married the young Englishman. Initially drawn to her beauty andsensuality, he becomes increasingly frustrated by his inability to reach intoher soul. He forces Antoinette to conform to his rigid Victorian ideals,unaware that in taking away her identity he is destroying a part of himself aswell as pushing her towards madness.
Set against the lush backdrop of 1830sJamaica, Jean Rhys's powerful, haunting masterpiece was inspired by herfascination with the first Mrs Rochester, the mad wife in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre.
'Compelling, painful and exquisite' Guardian
'Brilliant. A tale of dislocation anddispossession, which Rhys writes with a kind of romantic cynicism, desperate andpungent' The Times
'Rhys turns a menacing cipher into agrieving, plausible young woman, and one whose story says whole worlds aboutglobal mixtures, about the misunderstandings between the colonized, thecolonizers and the people who can't easily say which they are' Time
Jean Rhys was born in Dominica in 1890,the daughter of a Welsh doctor and a white Creole mother, and came to Englandwhen she was sixteen. Her first book, a collection of stories called The Left Bank, was published in 1927. This was followed by Quartet (originally Postures, 1928), After Leaving Mr Mackenzie(1930), Voyage in the Dark (1934) and Good Morning, Midnight (1939). None of these books was particularly successful and with theoutbreak of war they went out of print. Jean Rhys dropped from sight untilnearly twenty years later she was discovered living reclusively in Cornwall.During those years she had accumulated the stories collected in Tigers are Better-Looking. In 1966 she made a sensational reappearance with Wide Sargasso Sea, which won the Royal Society of Literature Award and the W. H. SmithAward. Her final collection of stories, Sleep It Off Lady, appeared in 1976 and Smile Please, her unfinished autobiography, was published posthumously in 1979. JeanRhys died in 1979.
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