Wide Sargasso Sea
By: Jean Rhys ; introduction by Francis Wyndham.
Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company
Published: 1982
Place of publication: New York, USA
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 189
ISBN-13: 9780393308808
Copyright date: 1966
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 coldhearted 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 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.
(back cover)