Wide Sargasso Sea

Jean Rhys's first novel since 1939, the most amazing literary reappearance of our time, Wide Sargasso Sea is the story of the first Mrs Rochester, the made wife in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre.

Antoinette Cosway is a Creole heiress; product of an inbred, decadent, expatriate community; a sensitive girl at once beguiled and repelled by the lush Jamaican landscape.

Soon after he marriage to Rochester, rumours of madness in the Cosway family poison Rochester's mind against her; Antoinette's beautiful face turns 'blank hating moonstruck' ... and the action narrows, as inexorable as Greek tragedy, towards the attic in Thornfield Hall, the grim Grace Poole ad the suicidal holocaust of leaping flames. --back cover