Rating: 
Summary: The Making of a Madwoman
Review: I have read several books over the past year that were inspired by or offered different viewpoints on other books and stories. These included "The Red Tent", "Wicked", "The Hours", and most recently "Wide Sargasso Sea." I have enjoyed reading all of them and love seeing new perspectives on classic tales. "Wide Sargasso Sea" is Jean Rhys' take on Bronte's "Jane Eyre". However, instead of focusing on Jane Eyre, Ryhs instead turns the lens onto the life of Bertha, the mad woman who is locked in the attic of Mr. Rochester's house. The story takes place in Jamaica and Dominica in the mid-1800's. It is a time of unrest between the English colonizers, the recently freed slaves, and the Creoles. Antoinette Cosway (Bertha) is the Creole daughter of former slave owners and an heiress. Rhys relays Antoinette's lonely childhood and her misfortunes with friendship and love. Antoinette's family arranges a marriage for her with a young English gentleman, Mr. Rochester. The book sheds a new, completely different light on the character of Mr. Rochester than what we saw in "Jane Eyre". "Wide Sargasso Sea" is narrated in several different voices including Antoinette and Mr. Rochester. These voices switch throughout the novel with little warning. Some may find this hard to follow. The novel also creates a great sense of place. Rhys does an excellent job of evoking the hot, humid atmosphere of the Caribbean. "Wide Sargasso Sea" was a recent selection in my book group. We enjoyed discussing it while dining on Caribbean fare. The discussion focused on topics such as colonialism, rich vs. poor, slavery, love, and of course madness. This was a good book for a discussion group since there were many themes to cover and also since it was inspired by "Jane Eyre", the group could also compare both books. I read the Norton Critical Edition of "Wide Sargasso Sea" which contained footnotes and an Appendix of essays and articles written about the book. The footnotes helped to deepen my understanding of the book since there were many references (literary and otherwise) that I may've missed.
Rating: 
Summary: A tale of dispossession and dislocation
Review: This brilliant novel primarily deals with contradictions and ambiguity. Written as a prelude to Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, Jean Rhys creates an identity for the otherwise shadowy figure of Bertha Mason, (Rochester's mad creole wife), through Antoinette a beautiful lonely Creole woman. Wide Sargasso Sea deals with contradictions and not just with feminist "rag issues" as other reviewers suggest, rather tending to deal with gender reversal. Christophine the freed black slave from another Caribbean Island, is a strong female character who displays masculine traits standing up to the bullying unnamed Englishman, (Rochester) who tries to use oppressive colonialist tactics to control the inhabitants of an exotic Island which cannot be controlled. Both are wild and unruly compared to his staid English persona, something which he cannot relate to. Antoinette is the weak female figure who is finally destroyed by the Enlgishman, driven to madness, through a combination of his desire for her and his distate and hate for everything that she represents. An intriguing tale full of ambiguity Wide Sargasso Sea is a sad tale of disposession and dislocation.
Rating: 
Summary: Three and a half stars
Review: Rhys' novel, the Wide Sargasso Sea is an interesting work, and listed at number 94 on the top 100 fictional works of the last century. In style, this novel is similar to some of Faulkner's work in that much of the text is extremely first-person. That is, Rhys gets so dialed-in to the character that the perception of events and interactions blurs and at times is hard to follow. Also, the first-person perspective shifts subtley from one character to the other. Much like Faulkner, the reader has to glean that the narration is from another character's perspective. As such, this is not a novel to breeze through, but rather one that you have to absorb. The words and the characters seem to sink in over time. It has an ephemeral quality that may have something to do with the Caribbean setting. The literatti love that Rhys took the character from Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, the "mad woman in the attic" and brought her to life. I, however, found that the strongest aspect of this work was the Faulkner-esque writing style, which transposed nicely with the Jamaican tropics. Rhys gives you a sense of life in the Caribbean, of its politics, its rhythyms, and its joys and despairs. The disjointed and transposed first-person perspective created an intense sense of the insanity of the woman against a backdrop of politics and socio-economic tension. The descent into madness of the main character, Annette Cosway, was confusing at times, but emblematic of Rhys' effort here. This is especially true at the end of the novel when the setting shifts to England and the once beautiful heiress has been transformed into the mad woman in the attic.
Rating:
Summary: Unique and Interesting!
Review: I was given this book to read by a friend who just loved it! He said to me, "RR, you just gotta read this book!" I took the book out of his hand and nodded. Two days later I had to thank my friend for the great book! I loved it. I thought it was unique and very interesting!
Rating: 
Summary: Novel without a cause
Review: Oscar Wilde once said that all art is useless, but if he could have read "Wide Sargasso Sea" I'm sure he would have agreed that some of it is more useless than others. It's nice that Jean Rhys, like many other readers including myself, admired Charlotte Bronte's monumental "Jane Eyre" and apparently was intrigued by Bertha, the infamous madwoman in the attic, but why did she feel compelled to write a novel filling in the blanks of this woman's past? The character of Bertha, who is said by some to symbolize repressed feminine sexuality, was intended by Bronte to be a mystery and to remain a mystery, and Rhys's attempt to invent a solution to this mystery is feeble, unenlightening, and unwelcome. Rhys has all the details in order. Born as Antoinette Cosway to a semi-Creole family of slaveowners, "Bertha" grows up on a dilapidated estate in Jamaica with a widowed mother who later marries a man named Mason. After a fire which destroys the estate (wink, wink) and in which her younger brother perishes, Antoinette is educated at a convent and becomes the bride of a young Englishman named Rochester who receives a large dowry for her from Mason. However, there is unhappiness on both sides of the marriage bed, resulting in Antoinette's gradual descent into insanity and Rochester's exasperation with his new wife's neurotic behavior. In fact, one of the novel's better moments depicts Rochester, regretful of the prospect of being inseparably tied to this batty woman for the rest of his life, contemplatively drawing a stick figure representation of her locked up in the attic of an English house, the effect of which is unintentionally comical but not a little eerie. The novel ends with Antoinette, whom Rochester now calls Bertha, as a pyromaniacal prisoner in Thornfield Hall as her husband envisioned in his crude sketch, and...well, so what? What exactly was Rhys trying to demonstrate with this little exercise in speculative character development? The unique intensity of her passion for "Jane Eyre"? Her sense of identity with Bertha because she was a West Indian Creole herself? The mess she could make of her prose by affecting a clumsy stream-of-consciousness narration that reads like third-rate Virginia Woolf? This is a misguided abortion of a prequel that does not merit an association with its source of inspiration.
Rating:
Summary: glad to have read it
Review: i had to read this book my senior year in high school and i'm glad i did. this is a novel about the strength lost by a young girl the same as her mother did. it end in much unhappiness and misery. but for some reason you walk away with not only a sense of justice but of happiness. happiness for the young girl because she finally got some peace.
Rating:
Summary: A lush and exotic spin-off
Review: "Wide Sargasso Sea" is my third Jean Rhys novel. I read "After Leaving Mr Mackenzie," and "Good Morning, Midnight" a few years ago, and I would rate both of those novels as "5 star books." So I came to "Wide Sargasso Sea" with really high expectations, and while I did enjoy the book, at the same time, I don't think it has quite the calibre of the other Rhys novels I've read. The novel is set in 19th Century and is in three parts. The first part is narrated by Antoinette Cosway, the main character, when she is a child. The second part is narrated by Mr Rochester. He is now married to Antoinette, and in the third part of the novel, Antoinette has become "the madwoman in the attic"--Bertha Rochester--the unloved, bothersome nuisance who stands between Mr Rochester and one of the most famous literary characters of all time--Jane Eyre. "Wide Sargasso Sea" as a novel on its own merits is an enjoyable story. Rhys captures the unique world of Antoinette Cosway at once showing the beauty of Jamaica and also the corruption and rot at the heart of the culture which was based on slavery. Slavery--although a thing of the recent past in Antoinette's experience--taints everything. Entire estates are in decay, and the creole landowners are suspicious and live in fear. It is a land of great beauty, and the language of the novel conveys the sense of exquisite beauty. I really would argue for a 'scratch and sniff' version of this novel. At times, the descriptive language is so strong that I expected the fragrances of the exotic, lush setting to leap out from the book's pages. The matchless descriptions of the decayed mansions, the colours and lush fragrances of the vegetation, the "orchids that flourished out of reach" all create an atmosphere of impending doom, and Antoinette seems oblivious to it, but at the same time, she is part of it too. Rochester seems to realise that there is something inherently wrong with the situation, but even he is seduced by the evil elements at work. I particularly loved "Massacre"--a place whose name no longer has any meaning, and certainly holds no interest to those already poisoned, tainted, and seduced. Antoinette is a doomed character (and here is the similarity with other Rhys novels); she is doomed in Jamaica, and she will be doomed in the cold sterility of an English attic. Bertha Rochester from the novel "Jane Eyre" is one of those fascinating minor characters from literature who are pivotal to the action, and yet their roles leave ripples of questions in their wake. We are told by Mr Rochester in "Jane Eyre" that his wife is mad and must be locked up for her own safety and for the safety of others. And yet, somehow for me, this explanation only led me to questions--such as where was Bertha from before she took up residence in Rochester's attic? Additionally, Bertha's displacement does not augur well for Rochester--especially since he has designs on Jane Eyre. The connotations are not pleasant, and Rhys created a Rochester who could also very believably exist within the pages of the Bronte novel. Antoinette Cosway is also very believable as the discarded Mrs Rochester. While I do not consider "Wide Sargasso Sea" as a perversion of "Jane Eyre", I don't think it's a perfect novel either. One part of "Wide Sargasso Sea" that I considered flawed is the depiction of the woman, Christophine. This character just did not ring true for me. I was also a little confused by the shift in narration, and was not prepared for the leap in time from Anotinette's childhood to adulthood. For several pages, I did not realise that the child narrator of the first part was now a married woman in part II. I was a bit confused by it, and ended up re-reading parts to get everything straight. If you enjoyed "Wide Sargasso Sea," there is a good chance that you will enjoy her other books too--although I would have to add here that if this was the first Rhys novel for me, I doubt that I would bother to seek out her others. I feel that the other Rhys novels were really far superior, and it is surprising to me that "Wide Sargasso Sea" was responsible for her reputation as a novelist--displacedhuman.
Rating: 
Summary: Doesn't do Jane Eyre Justice
Review: This book was for an AP English Literature and Composition course, as an over-the-summer assignment. That alone should have made me wary, but I eventually managed to finish reading it. By no stretch of the imagination does Ms. Rhys manage to do justice to the original Jane Eyre novel (of which it is called a "prequel"), nor does it do justice to Rochester's previously unnamed wife (known only as Bertha in the original novel). Credit to Rhys for trying, but she should stick to writing original pieces of fiction, rather than attempting to dissect the brain of a madwoman.
Rating:
Summary: Only the magic and the dream are true, all the rest is a lie
Review: To those who love books, there are various categories; fiction, social history, history, e.t.c.However, every now and then, you come across this one book that just touches your soul, who you want to be. There is, sometimes, this one story that makes you remember how you felt as a child, how you felt before you were told how you should feel. Such books thrust you back to your innermost feelings, make you stand face to face with who you really are. When reading the "Wide Sargasso Sea" for the first time, I felt naked in terms of my emotions, with reference to others, me, everything I had experienced as an "adult". It made me long to go back to who I originally was. In terms of literary value it is by far one of the most poetic novels I have ever read. Its words, sad and poignant are music to my ears, harsh tough they may be at times. Anyone looking for themselves should read it. The story-line is immaterial; the connection to "Jane Eyre" is really, at the end of the day irrelevant. What really matters is that this book will remind you of who you are, or who you wanted to be.
Rating:
Summary: Second rate biography of an invisible character
Review: The only reason I read this book was because I happen to be studying English at uni. Jean Rhys is definitely not Charlotte Bronte and should have left the character of Bertha Mason alone. I enjoyed "Jane Eyre", but this book was sub-standard at best. The author even had the effrontery of changing the character's name. Okay, so Edward Rochester is not the best person in "Jane Eyre", but he does not deserve to be portrayed as a manipulative mongrel in this novel. If he truly was that bad, then Miss Eyre is hardly a good judge of character.
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