Wide Sargasso Sea (Masterplots II: British and Commonwealth Fiction Series)
At a glance:
- Author: Jean Rhys
- First Published: 1966
- Type of Work: Romantic tragedy
- Time of Work: The late 1830’s to the mid-1850’s
- Setting: Jamaica and Great Britain
- Principal Characters: Antoinette Mason, Edward Rochester, Annette Cosway Mason
- Genres: Long fiction, Domestic realism
- Subjects: Maturation or coming of age, Culture, Caribbean, Love or romance, Race, Nature, Nineteenth century, Marriage, Alienation, England or English people, Jamaica or Jamaicans
- Locales: England, West Indies, Jamaica, Dominica, Windward Islands
The Novel
Wide Sargasso Sea is the life story of Antoinette Mason, chronicling her solitary girlhood on her family estate in Jamaica, her coming of age in a convent school, and her early marriage to Edward Rochester, which ends disastrously in her madness and destruction. Antoinette is the mad wife in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847), a figure with whom Jean Rhys identified and was fascinated for much of her life. Instead of the raving animal who is Bronte’s character, Rhys’s Antoinette is a doomed but utterly sympathetic and understandable heroine who is...
[The entire page is 2387 words long]
Join eNotes
Over 3,500 study guides, question and answer forums, literature criticism, reference content, and much more!
Navigate
See Also
