Antoinette Cosway is a Creole heiress, the product of an inbred, decadent, expatriate community, a sensitive girl at once beguiled and repelled by the lush Jamaican landscape. Soon after her marriage to Rochester rumors of madness in the Cosway family poison his mind against her; Antoinette's beautiful face turns 'blank hating moonstruck' . . . and the action narrows, as inexorably as Greek tragedy, towards the attic in Thornfield Hall, the grim Grace Poole and the suicidal holocaust of leaping flames. After twenty-seven years' silence Jean Rhys made a sensational literary reappearance with Wide Sargasso Sea, her story of the first Mrs. Rochester, the mad wife in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. It took her nine years to write it, and in its tragic power, psychological truth and magnificent poetic vision it stands out as one of the great novels of our time.
