Wide Sargasso Sea positions itself as a prequel to the events described in Brontë's tale and offers a much more nuanced and sympathetic portrait of the Creole madwoman Bertha, whom Rhys bestows with the more becoming moniker of 'Antoinette.' The title of the novella refers to the elongated portion of the Atlantic Ocean that separates England and the West Indies.

The two, presumably, go on to live happily ever after. Bertha dies in the blaze and Rochester is temporarily blinded but regains his vision soon after his reunion with and marriage to Jane. (This explains the evil laughter that Jane frequently hears emanating from the third story, as well as several strange incidents that befall the inhabitants of the house.) Jane, traumatized by the revelation of Rochester's shady past and horrified by his suggestion that she live as his mistress, flees from Thornfield, which the madwoman later burns to the ground. On the day of their nuptials, however, it comes out that Rochester is already married and is hiding his insane wife Bertha in the attic of his mansion. Rochester, and eventually agrees to marry him. She falls in love with her employer, the much-older Mr. In Jane Eyre, the eponymous heroine accepts a position as a governess at a remote country estate by the name of Thornfield Hall. Undoubtedly the most important piece of contextual information about Wide Sargasso Sea is that the novella was inspired by Charlotte Brontë's famous nineteenth-century novel Jane Eyre (1847). Perhaps because its multitude of 'interpretive possibilities,' the novella has attracted a variety of critics, from feminists to deconstructionists to post-colonial theorists. The narrative relies upon dream-like visions, fragmented impressions, incomplete sentences, and multiple first-person voices to create an unsettling overall sense of disorientation in the reader this confusion in turn reflects the experiences of the work's main characters. To be sure, Wide Sargasso Sea resists definition to an extent that many readers find frustrating. Simpson, it is a text that offers 'ambiguous and mutually incompatible interpretive possibilities.' As such Rhys's work has been classified as a paragon of post-structuralism, a literary movement that insists upon the absence of absolute truth in the world.

Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) is a short but dense literary work that becomes considerably more approachable when given some context.

The wide sargasso sea