num_pages: 190
description: Jean Rhys's reputation was made upon the publication of this passionate and heartbreaking novel, in which she brings into the light one of fiction's most mysterious characters: the madwoman in the attic from Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre.A sensual and protected young woman, Antoinette Cosway 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 slave-holding, excessive drinking, and nihilistic despair by enslaving her as a prisoner in his bleak English home.In this best-selling novel Rhys portrays a society so driven by hatred, so skewed in its sexual relations, that it can literally drive a woman out of her mind.
language: English
title: Wide Sargasso Sea
titlecomplete: Wide Sargasso Sea
characters: Pierre Cosway, Antoinette Cosway, Annette Cosway, Christophine, Aunt Cora, Richard Mason, Mr Mason, Grace Poole, Edward Rochester, Godfrey, Tia
genres: Fiction, Historical, School, Literature, Classics, Feminism, Novels, Historical Fiction, 20th Century, Literary Fiction
ratings_count: 88538
awards: awardedAt: -94665600000
name: WH Smith Literary Award, awardedAt: -126201600000
name: W.H. Heinemann Award
publisher: WW Norton & Co Inc