About the Author
Jean Rhys
1890-1979
Jean Rhys, born Ella Gwendolyn Rees Williams in 1890, was a 20th-century novelist and writer of short stories. Born and raised on the Caribbean island of Dominica, she moved to England at age 16, becam...
Jean Rhys, born Ella Gwendolyn Rees Williams in 1890, was a 20th-century novelist and writer of short stories. Born and raised on the Caribbean island of Dominica, she moved to England at age 16, became a chorus girl, and embarked on the life of a demimondaine there and in Europe. Her deep sense of being an outsider -- the descendant of white colonialists in the Caribbean, then a Creole in England -- never left her and deeply informed her work. Rhys's evocative sketches in the 1920s caught the eye, and briefly earned the patronage, of Ford Madox Ford (her fraught relationship with him is explored in her debut novel, Quartet [1928]). She is best known for her novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), which examined the character of Bertha Rochester (in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre) from a different angle.
Description
Jean Rhys's reputation was made upon publication of this passionate and heartbreaking novel, in which she brings into the light one of citsion's most mysterious characters: the madwoman in the attic from Charlotte Bronte's "Jane Eyre". A sensual and protected young woman, the narrator grows up in the lush, natural world of the Caribbean. She is sold into marriage to the cold-hearted and prideful Rochester, who succumbs to his need for money and his lust. Yet he will make her pay for her ancestors' sins of slaveholding, excessive drinking and nihilistic despair by enslaving her as a prisoner in his bleak British home.
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