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BOOKS I READ: Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (1966). Antoinette, as a child, witnesses her mother’s decline into madness that is made worse when she’s driven from her plantation, only to follow a similar arc as an adult, ending up in Thornfield Hall as Bertha, the madwoman in the attic in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.
Antoinette is raised in the West Indies, cared for by Christophine, her nurse, and Aunt Cora, who watches over her when her mother can’t. Christophine is a practitioner of obeah, and tries to help the adult Antoinette when her world begins to fall apart. Their attempt to corral her husband fails, and he brings her back to England. Mr. Rochester renames her Bertha, and hides her in the attic under the less than watchful eye of one, Grace Poole, who sometimes drinks herself into a stupor, giving Bertha room to roam the halls.
Jean Rhys, Caribbean-born British author, published Wide Sargasso Sea in 1966 when she was seventy-six after a long writing hiatus. (Her previous novel, Good Morning, Midnight, had been published in 1939.) The title expresses the morass that captures Antoinette, who feels neither British nor West Indian, yet spins under the influence of both worlds.
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