Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys

A prequel responding to Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea gives a voice to Jane Eyre's most mysterious and marginalised character, Rochester's first wife Bertha Mason.

The novel tells the tale of Antoinette Cosway, a white Creole woman struggling to adapt to an impoverished life in the West Indies after the abolition of slavery. It charts Antoinette's childhood and womanhood, when she marries Mr Rochester and is gradually moulded into Bertha Mason.

Wide Sargasso Sea is a literary classic, which is still studied today more than 40 years after it was published. After wanting to read it for years, I finally picked up the novel and was surprised by what I found.

The novel charts a world which couldn't be further away from the grey, dreary England of Jane Eyre. It is hot, exotic, mysterious and hostile, with racial tensions underpinning and overwhelming Antoinette and her family's every day life.

Like her future rival Jane, Antoinette is naive, lonely and unloved. Her father already dead, she is rejected by her mother who lavishes her attention on her disabled brother Pierre. Her only friend Tia only associates with her after the friendship was engineered by Antoinette's nanny Christophine and then turns on her viciously. Antoinette is pushed out further when her mother remarries Mr Mason. When the family home is set alight in a blaze of racial hate, Antoinette's mother is tipped into madness and the girl's life is never the same again. Her mother later dies, leaving Antoinette rich.

Through Antoinette's narration, we soon discover that she has married Mr Rochester (although he is never named). Honeymooning in a place called Massacre, the marriage soon turns sour when Rochester starts to believe wicked lies and rumours about his new bride. He pushes Antionette away and beds one of her servants, determined to break her.

Rochester is cold, vicious and unfeeling, a man who married Antoinette for her fortune and has the gall to take away everything she is and owns, including her name. Antoinette is the ultimate other; she is a woman, white yet Creole, exotic but still rejected by the community surrounding her. She loses power with each page of the novel, completely shackled by her marriage. She has lost her fortune, her status and her independence.

Against a backdrop of magic, rumour and mystery, Antoinette is driven into madness as she is stripped of everything she ever had, including her dignity and freedom. Rochester takes her to England and locks her up without ever visiting her.

Dreamy, disturbing and dark, Wide Sargasso Sea is a fascinating response to Jane Eyre, giving a voice to the so-called mad first wife. Rochester is shown as a calculating brute, a man who undoubtedly does not deserve a second chance of love that he gets with Jane. While it is a good read, it is so short part of me felt some opportunities were lost, particularly the surprisingly brief section of Bertha's imprisonment. Although not completely satisfying, Wide Sargasso Sea is a must-read for anyone who wants to see Jane Eyre from a new, exciting and darker perspective.

My next read: The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry.