Available Formats
Hardback
Published: 14th November 2016
Paperback
Published: 13th May 2011
Paperback
Published: 30th May 2019
Wide Sargasso Sea
By (Author) Jean Rhys
Introduction by Andrea Ashworth
Penguin Books Ltd
Penguin Classics
14th November 2016
6th October 2016
United Kingdom
General
Fiction
823.912
Hardback
192
Width 135mm, Height 205mm, Spine 20mm
292g
A gorgeous clothbound edition of Jean Rhys's great masterpiece of desire and madness in the Caribbean Jean Rhys's late masterpiece Wide Sargasso Sea was inspired by Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, and is set in the lush, beguiling landscape of Jamaica in the 1830s. Born into an oppressive, colonialist society, Creole heiress Antoinette Cosway meets a young Englishman who is drawn to her innocent sensuality and beauty. After their marriage the rumours begin, poisoning her husband against her. Caught between his demands and her own precarious sense of belonging, Antoinette is driven towards madness.
Jean Rhys was born in Dominica in 1894. After arriving in England aged sixteen, she became a chorus girl and drifted between different jobs before moving to Paris, where she started to write in the late 1920s. She published a story collection and four novels, after which she disappeared from view and lived reclusively for many years. In 1966 she made a sensational comeback with her masterpiece, Wide Sargasso Sea, written in difficult circumstances over a long period. Rhys died in 1979.