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Summary: Racism, madness, and an exotic backdrop
Review: The gimick is known: this novel tells the story of Antoinette "Bertha" Cosway-Rochester before her inprisonment in the atic as depicted in Charolotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. Rhys has managed to bring a previously undeveloped character to life and to return her dignity to her. This novel examines race issues in the Carribean while it depicts the romance-gone-sour that lead to Rochester's brooding, tormented personality from Jane Eyre. Recommended.
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Summary: Beach Book
Review: Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys is a pretty good novel. It was difficult to get into at first, but in the middle of the novel the story line begins to unfold. Throughout the novel the speaker changes and at times it was hard to determine who was speaking. I would recommend this book to those who have read Jane Eyre because those people would get more out of it and the connections between the two novels. This book would be a great beach book, since most of the novel is set in the Caribbean, true paradise.
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Summary: Essential
Review: Wide Sargasso Sea is both a critical response to Jane Eyre and a tribute to it; and obviously it also stands on its own as a powerful, important, brilliant work. Rhys explores the implications of postcolonial life in the Caribbean, and embodies the contradictions she herself experienced as a Creole woman writer, within the strife experienced by Antoinette. Her lyrical power is enormous, her writing is beautiful and concise, and the psychology and history presented in the novel, through a tale at once personal and universal, is amazing. This is a complex work, an important modernist text, which explores identity, race, sanity, and love, questioning reality along the way. Read Rhys, she knows what's up...
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Summary: Another perspective
Review: As a fan of Jane Eyre, this book offered a whole new of realm of perception and distortion to Bertha/Antoinette, Rochester's mad wife. I would recommend this book for anyone who has read Jane Eyre, and would like to view the novel from an entirely different angle.
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Summary: wonderful book
Review: I didn't realize when I started this book that it was about Jane Eyre's Rochester's mad first wife - I probably wouldn't have read it as I have never cared for Jane Eyre (too passive for me) and thought Rochester a bloody clot. At the end when I realized who everyone was, I 1) immediately realized WHY I had never liked Rochester (I was right all those years, he is an ass) and 2) read it again. It's as different from Bronte's writing as Jane is from Antoinette; really lush and sensual. By the end of the second reading I disliked Rochester doubly one for pushing poor Antoinette over the edge and two for playing with poor ol' Jane's emotions. He really was a jerk. ;)
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Summary: Descent into madness
Review: Wide Sargasso Sea is a reworking and reanalysing of Jane Eyre's contrast Bertha. The style is careful with every line potentially meaningful. Antoinette, Bertha's real name, is a worthy character to mould and examine. Rochester is worth having a dig at. After all, he is an aristocratic, morally obstinate, brick in Jane Eyre so he's no different in Wide Sargasso Sea. The dig is aimed at the British Empire and the problems that slavery brought. As some other reviews state Wide Sargasso Sea is a modern classic, with modernists twists and turns and psychological analysis. It's not depressive but realistic and a valuable expression of the author's intentions.
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Summary: haunting, sad, wonderful
Review: i can only say that i finished this book in 2 days (4 sittings) and for about a week, it travelled with me wherever i went like a perfume of a loved one who has left the country for an indefinite amount of time.
i found myself reading some parts outloud.
a real "story-book".
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Summary: A Haunting Masterpiece
Review: "They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did. But we were not in their ranks." The sense of alienation that Antoinette Cosway experiences as a child never lets up in this harrowing tale of the first Mrs Rochester. Whilst Jane Eyre of the original novel manages to leave her painful past behind, Antoinette is unable to fight against the oppression of her surroundings. Her husband, bewildered by her passions, cannot understand her and seeks instead to contain her during her inexorable descent into madness. In my opinion this book is as worthy of acclaim as the great novel that inspired it. "Wide Sargasso Sea" is in no sense a pastiche of "Jane Eyre". Rhys evokes, in her beautiful, laconic style, the haunting beauty of the Caribbean, the uneasy relations of the islanders after the abolition of slavery,the love Antoinette and her husband initially have for each other, which makes the inevitable end so much more painful. It is said that it took Jean Rhys nine years to write this slim volume, but the result is an enduring masterpiece of the English language.
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Summary: The Darker Side of "Jane Eyre"
Review: I loved the idea of this book -- especially being a "Jane Eyre" fan. It is a strange book though and not a happy one. I struggled with it throughout because it challenged my previous conceptions of Mr. Rochester. I admit though that ultimately it did not matter -- my curiosity got the better of me. Who has not wondered about the lunatic wife in "Jane Eyre?!" This book does a fair job at explaining the causes: an other worldly environment, an elusive husband -- both which contribute to Antoinette Cosway's/Berthe's (Mr. Rochester's wife) unraveling. If you have ever wondered why Mr. Rochester's wife ended up locked away in the attic, then this book is for you.
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Summary: Fans of Jane Eyre, beware...
Review: I remember reading Jane Eyre when I was 17 for my AP English class. I had to bite my lip when Rochester kissed Jane for the first time. Charlotte Bronte did an excellent job of creating a flawed, passionate romantic anti-hero that has yet to be rivaled by anyone (although her sister's Heathcliff comes pretty close). Jean Rhys' portrait doesn't rival Bronte's. Instead, she rips Rochester down so thoroughly that everything that made the "original" appealing is now nauseating. Her younger Rochester is selfish, spiteful and malicious. While he cannot be blamed for Antoinette's ultimate descent into madness, he is the one in the book who gives her the last push she needs. This is an extremely depressing book from start to finish. Rhys makes you attach quickly to the hopeless, friendless girl, and you find yourself hoping along with her that Rochester will be the savior that she imagines him to be, even though you know he can't possibly. Despite knowing how it's going to end, Rhys' final chapter surprises and (even further) saddens you; though you can't be sure if it's a fantasy or a memory, it's a glimpse into a happier world that was within her reach but for everything else around her.
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