As Antoinette tells us, 'there is always the other side.' And, of course, it's fascinating to grapple with the dark underbelly of Jane Eyre - we always suspected there was something more to the mad woman in the attic, but never quite knew what - until now. Indeed, much as JM Coetzee does in Foe, Rhys makes a feature of omissions - her book is very episodic. This is a compelling exploration of the gaps and silences in Jane Eyre. Early on, we see an angry slave mob burn down the Masons' plantation house, and at last, Antoinette decides to step into their shoes: she will set fire to Rochester's house, and everything it represents to her. It is not until the end that she decides where she stands.

Antoinette becomes Bertha.Īntoinette spends most of the book caught in the kind of cultural and racial schizophrenia familiar to readers of Dambudzo Marechera's House of Hunger.

Jane manages to resist Rochester's attempts to possess her, but Antoinette's identity is gradually subsumed into her husband's, until finally he renames her. Jane's story is one of passionate personal integrity, but Antoinette's is a contrasting narrative - the breakdown of identity. In many ways, she is Jane Eyre's mirror image, perhaps her doppelganger, but her fate is a very different one. She is a white Creole, not accepted by the black community, and barely acceptable to the white. Meanwhile, Antoinette's sanity begins to deteriorate. After the wedding, rumours begin to reach Rochester that his wife's mother was mad, that the girl is promiscuous, and that she may be racially 'impure.' As it blunders through a fog of half-truths, tropical storms and sexual obsession, the relationship breaks down. There, a young Mr Rochester (who is never named) meets and marries a beautiful Creole heiress, Antoinette. Wide Sargasso Sea is set in a lush 19th century Jamaica, all violence, voodoo and vibrant colours, and like many of Jean Rhys's work contains many elements of her own life story. Wide Sargasso Sea, published 120 years after Charlotte Brontë's classic, tells the story of Rochester's first wife, who appears in Jane Eyre as a slavering lunatic, and who lacks any voice to put us right. But what is so unsettling about this book is that Jean Rhys suggests that Bertha Mason, aka mad wife in the attic, is not just Rochester's skeleton in the closet she is ours as well. Most readers are familiar with the book that inspired it, Jane Eyre, and many of us (well, at least some) swooned over the smouldering hero Mr Rochester.

Wide sargasso sea audiobook