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Wide Sargasso Sea is the story of Antoinette Cosway, a Creole heiress who grew up in the West Indies on a decaying plantation. When she comes of age she is married off to an Englishman, and he takes her away from the only place she has known--a house with a garden where "the paths were overgrown and a smell of dead flowers mixed with the fresh living smell. Underneath the tree ferns, tall as forest tree ferns, the light was green. Orchids flourished out of reach or for some reason not to be touched."
The novel is Rhys's answer to Jane Eyre. Charlotte Brontė's book had long haunted her, mostly for the story it did not tell--that of the madwoman in the attic, Rochester's terrible secret. Antoinette is Rhys's imagining of that locked-up woman, who in the end burns up the house and herself. Wide Sargasso Sea follows her voyage into the dark, both from her point of view and Rochester's. It is a voyage charged with soul-destroying lust. "I watched her die many times," observes the new husband. "In my way, not in hers. In sunlight, in shadow, by moonlight, by candlelight. In the long afternoons when the house was empty."
Rhys struggled over the book, enduring rejections and revisions, wrestling to bring this ruined woman out of the ashes. The slim volume was finally published when she was 70 years old. The critical adulation that followed, she said, "has come too late." Jean Rhys died a few years later, but with Wide Sargasso Sea she left behind a great legacy, a work of strange, scary loveliness. There has not been a book like it before or since. Believe me, I've been searching. --Emily White
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Book Description Soft cover. Condition: New. 1st Edition. Text/NEW & Bright. Softcover/NF w/a whisper of shelfwear.British novelist Jean Rhys (1890 - 1979), appointed 1978 a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for her writings, was born & raised in the Caribbean island of Dominica until the age of 16 before sent to England for schooling. This, her best known novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, was written in 1966, won the Royal Society of Literature Award, and the W.H. Smith Award; this is a 1998 reprint edition. Written as a prequel to Charlotte Brontė's Jane Eyre. Set in 1880s Jamaica, an account of a Creole heiress Antoinette Cosway who marries a young Englishman --- she spirited child which the British Empire's Slavery Abolition Act of 1834 plunged into poverty, and he who embraced rigid, Victorian values & expecting wives to behave accordingly. He will force Antoinette to conform, unaware that in denying her her identiy, pushes her into madness, and destroys a part of himself as well! 152 pgs in 3 parts. Part I, Antoinette's childhood; II, Alternating points of view of Antoinette and husband during their honeymoon; and III, Again from Antoinette perspective, now in England, renamed "Bertha", and, hidden & confined to the attic under guard. Brilliant novel of social dislocation & dispossession as world's social-philosophical values change. Seller Inventory # 020658
Book Description Paperback. Condition: New. Seller Inventory # Abebooks12108
Book Description Condition: New. New. In shrink wrap. Looks like an interesting title! 0.35. Seller Inventory # Q-0140274219