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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Clever little book.,
By
This review is from: Wide Sargasso Sea (Paperback)
I picked up this story because I'm working my way through Time's 100 All Time Best Novels, not realizing that it was intended to be a prequel to Bronte's Jane Eyre, and was pleasantly surprised.
Rhys took issue with Bronte's character Mrs. Rochester, who was of Carribbean descent like Rhys herself (Creole), and set out to create a story that explains how that tragic figure came to be. In Rhys' tale, the original Mrs. Rochester (the young Antoinette Cosway) had a relatively happy, whimsical beginning in the West Indies, but was eventually driven to madness by a combination of racism, sexism, and colonial oppression. Derided by black and white residents alike for her Creole heritage, and stripped of material belongings by her English husband, she ends up the "mad woman in the attic" that Bronte describes. It's a short novel, told from both Antoinette's and her husbands point of view, but rich with social commentary.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Beautifully written, but NOT Charlotte Brontė's characters!,
By Traxy "The Squeee" (Nottingham, UK) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Wide Sargasso Sea (Paperback)
The book is split into three parts. The first one is the childhood of future Mad Wife in the Attic from her perspective, the second is from the perspective of a newly-wed Edward Rochester and, in a short and confusing part, by Bertha, and the third one is by Bertha at Thornfield. Why is part two confusing? Because it's all told by Rochester, and then it jumps and you don't immediately realise that the perspective has shifted, and once you're used to it, it switches back to Rochester.
The first time I read this book, I hated it, and was left with a feeling of being annoyed that the author had completely failed to understand Rochester. I even said (aloud!) "Well, I disagree" after I closed it. On a second read, I still can't agree with Jean Rhys, but I enjoyed the book more. Having read a bunch of books about writing now, I can appreciate the book in a sort of aesthetical way. It's well-written, the characters have very distinct voices and the use of senses drags you in and gives such a rich colour and flavour that you partially forget that you're reading a book. Jean Rhys was born in Dominica in 1894 and was half-Welsh and half-Creole, so she knows what she's talking about with regards to the Caribbean, and you can tell. It can only have been written by someone who knows what it's like there. Now, if only the characters weren't supposed to be Charlotte Brontė's ... That's the biggest problem. She's referred to as Antoinette, not Bertha; even though she's "Bertha Antoinetta Mason" in Charlotte Brontė's original. In the UK, your first name, your given name, is the one that goes first. Hence why "Bertha Antoinetta Mason" logically should be "Bertha Mason", not "Antoinetta Mason". In the book, she's Antoinetta but calls herself Antoinette, because that's what her mother was called. Bertha is a name she doesn't like and that Rochester insists on calling her because umm, IT'S HER NAME? Richard Mason is only her stepbrother. Her mother was married to a guy called Cosway, who apparently went crazy and died. The mother then remarried Mr. Mason, father of Richard, and she started losing her mind after her son (the "complete dumb idiot" Rochester refers to in the original) died. I think part two even mentions old Mr. Mason having died before the marriage or at least close to it - there is some way that he seems to be removed from the whole set-up. And who did the original say arranged the wedding? Mr. Mason and Richard with old Mr. Rochester and Rowland. The Masons were as in on it as the Rochesters, eager to be rid of her before the Rochesters would realise the mistake they had made. Then there's a point where young Antoinette is at school, and she is going to embroider "1839" on something. I thought "Jane Eyre" was set around 1838? I'm also left with the impression that she's taken out of school at the age of 17 in order to get married off. Rochester is around 21 or 22 at the time, and Bertha is a good five years his senior (her age being something the Masons had lied to him about before the wedding). Rhys claims Antoinette's mother died the year before the marriage - the original says Rochester first thought the woman was dead but he came to find out that she wasn't, "she was only mad, and shut up in a lunatic asylum." Also, Brontė is clear to point out that he wasn't allowed to be alone with her before the marriage and they hardly spoke two words to each other. That way, Edward never had a chance to get to know her beforehand, because if he had, he would never have married her. They had nothing in common and he found her a woman with infantile intellect and he couldn't keep a conversation with her even if he tried. If you're going to write a spin-off of something, at least have the decency to stick to the facts as they've been laid out in the original. Make up things that aren't in the original as much as you want, but the bits that are in the original, please get them right. From what I've gathered, Jean Rhys had a fixation on Mrs. Rochester so trying to apologise for her behaviour by giving her a backstory that doesn't quite add up to Brontė's original is understandable. If the characters hadn't been from "Jane Eyre", the book would've been excellent. As for now, I think it's okay. It's a good book, but she's got the events and main characters wrong. It's my firm belief that Bertha Mason wasn't half as interesting a person as Jean Rhys makes her out to be. Yes, Bertha is a victim of sorts - being married off to someone who doesn't know the true you just so that your family can breathe a sigh of relief and hope it'll be too late to do anything about it by the time the groom notices something's wrong - but she's not a victim in the way that Rhys wants her to be. Bertha was mentally ill, not just some spirited girl who didn't like the husband she'd been married off to. I don't think she was ever really fully aware of what happened, and while that is sad in itself, I think Rhys just tried a bit too hard to make her sympathetic when she quite clearly never meant to be anything other than a woman whose mental illness was bad to begin with but quickly got worse.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Jean Rhys created this masterpiece late in life...,
By
This review is from: Wide Sargasso Sea (Paperback)
I loved the biogrpahy of Jean Rhys which gave me motivation to re-read all her books. None held a candle in my opinion to her last novel, this masterpiece. It pulls you into the sensual Caribbean, it gives so much in the way of the relationship that began in Charlotte Bronte's "JANE EYRE"... You don't have to know the Bronte story to totally enjoy the atmopherics here. There is love and hate, black and white, lush descriptions and even when you aren't sure who is talking, this novel is a complete gem, rare and quite a miracle given Jean Rhys' life, how she wrote this toward the end of it, how she wrote like an angel. Highly recommend.
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