Rating: 
Summary: Jane Eyre's Bertha
Review: Goodness. I just finished reading Rhys' novel and it blew me away. Charlotte Bronte is my favorite author and "Jane Eyre" is my favorite novel. I had high expectations reading this book and they were exceeded. "Wide Sargasso Sea" had the literary quality that JE deserved.
Antoinette's life in the Caribbean, very carefully and vividly constructed, traces in an almost paranormal way the process of A. going mad. Soon I had busted out my pencil and I was jotting away in the margins.
The connections to JE are subtle and eerie, such as the continual mention of the looking-glass (and its final reflection in its "gilded frame" - yikes!) Rochester is treated with complexity in such a way that his character is actually believable as Bronte's Rochester too. A.'s relationship with her mother and Christophine is interesting and nuanced and does interesting things with A's identity and her conceptualization of her self. The final chapter of the novel is worth the crick in my neck I got for reading too long - and then some. The final chapter (back in Bronte's England) had imagery to give Bronte a run for her money.
"Wide Sargasso Sea" is beyond brilliant in it's imagery, characters, complexity, and readability. No reading of Jane Eyre can be considered complete without it. You must, however, read JE first. (And then maybe again after reading Rhys.)
Rating:
Summary: Beautiful and profound
Review: This book is one of the most beautifully written works I have ever had the pleasure of reading. Jean Rhys transforms the words to experience. It's almost as if the reader is able to smell the island flowers, feel the breeze, hear the sounds. Not only is the writing superb, but the message is profound, drawing paralells between the subjection of women and colonialization which leave the reader thinking long after the reading is complete.
Rating: 
Summary: :(
Review: Not altogether interesting. Not altogether illuminating of the human condition. Even as a companion piece to Jane Eyre, not altogether necessary.
I didn't particularly care for the tone of the language, the narrative voice, or the subject matter. This novel just wasn't my bag. (Neither was Jane Eyre.)
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: An exposure
Review: this book is truly an exposure to the mad woman's character in Jane Eyre. An enjoyable work and truly Rhy's greatest contribution to readers of Jane Eyre.
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