The book that changed the Way I read:

I imagine some of you will have read Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. I did and whilst i enjoyed the novel I was very frustrated by the hero Mr Rochester and a little with Jane as well. Mr Rochester indeed- so …well… so restrained and infuriatingly correct and proper and prim- except for Bertha the women in the attic who in the Bronte novel is never anything but a brooding mad presence.

Enter Jean Rhys, white creole from Dominica, disappointed young woman trying to make her way in the world, sometime muse, wannabe artist, reveller in France , mother , wife and widow, poor and struggling, and dreamer. I want to know what made her see the Bertha of the Bronte book as a possibility for literary development? I have scoured everything that Rhys has ever written including her letters, and really she does not say much about it. But the story of Bertha/Antoinette she developed into a work of genius- The Wide Sargasso Sea. Rhys wrote this book late in her life , it was published after her 76th birthday and her earlier writing does not have the same touch, though I do like her other written work which includes Quartet. I picked up The Wide Sargasso Sea not long after I had read Jane Eyre. I loved the title for a start. I love words that suggest faraway enchanted places- the words kind of roll out of your mouth and straight away you are not in the place you were. And then she creates Bertha/Antoinette as a full fledged person to whom Rochester was far from nice- she picked up the little flaws that one the one hand make Rochester so proper and well so darned boring really and she uses this not as the basis of his “goodness’ but in reality his “badness” although some reviewers still view him as good- I am not so sure?. I loved the whole subversiveness of her idea, and in all reality she has made me peek behind every character I have read ever since.It has made me think about what might be the other lurking in the background.It adds a whole dimension to reading where not only are you responding to the written word and the authors intent and your realisation of them inside your head, but it opens the door to a whole other imagining of what is written

Some come and join, Jean has graciously agreed to come and talk and tell us about her childhood, her life in Paris and London , her later life in England.

http://www.eng.fju.edu.tw/worldlit/caribbean/rhys.htm and http://www.qub.ac.uk/schools/SchoolofEnglish/imperial/carib/sargasso.htm and http://discussingbooks.cohprog.com/dbe/English/WideSargassoSea.htm

and http://www.english-literature.org/essays/bronte_rhys.html

Djanne Cevaal