Hi friends and happy Monday! I hope you’re all doing well. I’m back with another classic read! Today I’m posting my reading update thoughts on Wide Sargasso Sea by: Jean Rhys.

Wide Sargasso Sea, a masterpiece of modern fiction, was Jean Rhys’s return to the literary center stage. She had a startling early career and was known for her extraordinary prose and haunting women characters. With Wide Sargasso Sea, her last and best-selling novel, she ingeniously brings into light one of fiction’s most fascinating characters: the madwoman in the attic from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. This mesmerizing work introduces us to Antoinette Cosway, a sensual and protected young woman who is sold into marriage to the prideful Mr. Rochester. Rhys portrays Cosway amidst a society so driven by hatred, so skewed in its sexual relations, that it can literally drive a woman out of her mind.

A new introduction by the award-winning Edwidge Danticat, author most recently of Claire of the Sea Light, expresses the enduring importance of this work. Drawing on her own Caribbean background, she illuminates the setting’s impact on Rhys and her astonishing work.

Goodreads synopsis

I’ve literally just scratched the surface of this book (30 pages) and I feel like I’ve been dropped into the middle of something. If I’m being honest, I’ve never heard of this book before picking it up for my classics project so I have no idea what to expect from it (good things, I hope!🤞🏻). I read that this is like a prequel to Jane Eyre (which I haven’t read yet – soon!) and that it’s based on a character from that novel. This leaves me both intrigued for this novel and Jane Eyre, when I get there!

I’m now a lot further in this story and lots has happened. In part one we see the world through Antoinette’s eyes, then come part two, in which I’m about halfway through, we get a shift in perspective, as we’re now in her husband, Rochester’s view and do things really start to change form. We know that she didn’t want to marry him and that she was basically forced and sold into this marriage, but now that he’s finding out her family’s past, he’s thinking of punishing her for it. That seems wild to me. The writing is easy to follow and now that I’ve gotten to the midway point, I don’t want to stop reading because I’m like, what’s going to happen? Is this man going to get his revenge? It’s definitely atmospheric, and Rhys really makes you feel like you’re right there with her characters. I’ll be back next week with my final thoughts, but for now, I’m currently engaged and enjoying this!

I have mixed emotions about this book because I feel like I should have liked it more than I did. I think in the end I liked the concept of the story more than I liked the actual novel. I was really into it and then things went spinning out of control the more we learned about Antoinette and her husband, her family’s past, and the history of the land. It was fascinating, but I found as the story went on, the more disjointed the writing felt, like we were going mad with Antoinette. I had to go back and reread parts because I had no idea what was happening. That kind of took me out of the story and left me confused. I did like that she fought back when her husband accused her about her family. This led into part 3, which was ghostly and kinda creepy, on how she ended up in the attic, locked away, which in turn leads into the character from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. As someone who hasn’t read Jane Eyre yet, this novel is ok as a stand-alone, but it definitely feels like it’s missing something. I wish this had been longer to give us more context to Antoinette and her life. This just felt like a snippet of a character we know better in another book. It’s so hard to review without reading the source material. All I can say is that I did, for the most part, enjoy this novel. I thought it started off strong, but kinda lost its lustre along the way. I also thought it had a lot to unpack in terms of race and gender as well as the social and political climate of that time in the West Indies. I feel like Rhys could have spent a little more time on it, again to give more context to enrich the reader. Her writing was very atmospheric and I enjoyed that, I just wish it had been more descriptive. In the end, this is a 3 star read for me. Maybe once I read Jane Eyre I’ll appreciate this novel more. 

 Have you read Wide Sargasso Sea? Let me know in the comments!