Life & Background
Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams was born in Dominica in 1890 to a Welsh doctor and a white Creole mother whose family had owned a plantation. She came to England at sixteen and never lost the sense of being out of place; she worked as a chorus girl, an artist's model, and a volunteer cook, drifted through Europe, and was briefly mentored and edited by Ford Madox Ford in 1920s Paris, where she published four novels between 1928 and 1939. Then she vanished from literary life for nearly thirty years, living in obscurity and poverty in Cornwall and Devon, so thoroughly forgotten that she was assumed dead. A BBC adaptation in 1958 led to her rediscovery, and Wide Sargasso Sea appeared in 1966 when she was seventy-six. She died in 1979.
Wide Sargasso Sea
A prequel to Jane Eyre. In post-emancipation Jamaica, Antoinette Cosway grows up on a decaying estate with a mother the freed community despises and the English settlers ignore. Their house is burned and her brother dies; her mother loses her mind. Antoinette is married off to an unnamed young Englishman — recognisably Rochester — in an arrangement made for her dowry. He narrates the middle section, increasingly repelled by the landscape, the heat, and his wife, and receives a letter alleging madness in her family. He renames her Bertha, takes her to England, and locks her in an attic. In the third part she narrates from that room, holding a candle, dreaming of fire, and walking out along the dark passage.
The novel is the founding example of the postcolonial counter-text: it takes a canonical English novel and writes from the position its plot required to be silent. Its formal argument is narrative voice — Antoinette speaks first and last, and Rochester's section is bracketed by hers, reversing the authority of the original. Rhys also insists on the specific position of the white Creole, belonging to neither the Black community that was enslaved by her family nor the English who regard her as not quite white. Spivak's essay Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism reads the novel alongside Jane Eyre and Frankenstein, and Gilbert and Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic takes its title from the same figure.
Why Rhys Matters
Wide Sargasso Sea is the most taught postcolonial rewriting of a canonical text, and the standard case for how a novel can be reread from the perspective it excluded. Rhys's earlier novels, particularly Good Morning, Midnight, are significant modernist works about women without money, and her thirty-year disappearance and late rediscovery is a much-discussed episode in publishing and reputation.
Key Facts
All Major Works
- The Left Bank1927
- Quartet1928
- After Leaving Mr Mackenzie1931
- Voyage in the Dark1934
- Good Morning, Midnight1939
- Wide Sargasso Sea1966