Publication Date:January 1999 Availability:Usually ships in 24 hours
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ISBN13: 9781568497297
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Condition: NEW
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Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com Review In 1966 Jean Rhys reemerged after a long silence with a novel called Wide Sargasso Sea. Rhys had enjoyed minor literary success in the 1920s and '30s with a series of evocative novels featuring women protagonists adrift in Europe, verging on poverty, hoping to be saved by men. By the '40s, however, her work was out of fashion, too sad for a world at war. And Rhys herself was often too sad for the world--she was suicidal, alcoholic, troubled by a vast loneliness. She was also a great writer, despite her powerful self-destructive impulses.
Wide Sargasso Sea is the story of Antoinette Cosway, a Creole heiress who grew up in the West Indies on a decaying plantation. When she comes of age she is married off to an Englishman, and he takes her away from the only place she has known--a house with a garden where "the paths were overgrown and a smell of dead flowers mixed with the fresh living smell. Underneath the tree ferns, tall as forest tree ferns, the light was green. Orchids flourished out of reach or for some reason not to be touched."
The novel is Rhys's answer to Jane Eyre. Charlotte Brontë's book had long haunted her, mostly for the story it did not tell--that of the madwoman in the attic, Rochester's terrible secret. Antoinette is Rhys's imagining of that locked-up woman, who in the end burns up the house and herself. Wide Sargasso Sea follows her voyage into the dark, both from her point of view and Rochester's. It is a voyage charged with soul-destroying lust. "I watched her die many times," observes the new husband. "In my way, not in hers. In sunlight, in shadow, by moonlight, by candlelight. In the long afternoons when the house was empty."
Rhys struggled over the book, enduring rejections and revisions, wrestling to bring this ruined woman out of the ashes. The slim volume was finally published when she was 70 years old. The critical adulation that followed, she said, "has come too late." Jean Rhys died a few years later, but with Wide Sargasso Sea she left behind a great legacy, a work of strange, scary loveliness. There has not been a book like it before or since. Believe me, I've been searching. --Emily White
Product Description 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 her marriage to Rochester rumours of madness in the Cosway family poison Rochester's mind against her.
Devastating StoryMarch 2, 2010 A. Luciano(Lowell, MA United States) 1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Antoinette has a tough childhood. She is a white child living in Jamaica when the slaves are freed. Her family is ostracized and in danger. Her mother eventually remarries and they leave their family home in flames, burned by the angry and vengeful people of the village.
Years later, Antoinette is married to a man she's never met. On their honeymoon to Dominica, her husband starts to feel uneasy about their marriage. He doesn't like the overgrown environment of Dominica, and he really doesn't like the black servants working for them, especially Christophine, who was a slave of Antoinette's family when Antoinette was a child. He finds out distressing information about his wife's family and blames her for the position in which he feels stuck. As revenge, he withholds all love and affection from his wife, and calls her crazy until she becomes so.
Antoinette is moved into the attic of her husband's home in England, where she lives out her days under guard and slips through the sleeping house at night, thinking of revenge.
This is a devastating story of a woman trapped in her life. Throughout her life she doesn't have any choices, and her attempt to make things better between herself and her husband backfires on her.
The connection to "Jane Eyre" is nice, and it's an ambitious project to attempt to speak for a character who has no voice in that novel. I didn't feel like I had the chance to get to know the characters well enough from this book, though. It was so brief, and told in alternating viewpoints, and I didn't feel like I had a firm grasp on why Antoinette's husband was so awful and how Antoinette spiraled down into madness so quickly. I would have liked more time to get to know these characters, and perhaps gain more insight into their personalities.
An answer to Empire, and perhaps a sliver of light on HaitiJanuary 15, 2010 Samuel Chell(Kenosha,, WI United States) 2 out of 2 found this review helpful
This is a deceptive book--at first glance it appears much shorter and more accessible that its putative motivator and predecessor, Charlotte Bronte's "Jane Eyre." But the novel is fragmented, impressionistic, a pastiche of dreams and shifting viewpoints from inscrutable narrators. It's not at all an easy story to grab on to, yet it contains passages of undeniable evocative power, ranging from the Dionysian seductiveness of the tropics to the hysteria of a land in oppression and revolt.
The reader who stays with the story--not once but two or three times--will be amply rewarded by an author capable of suggesting so much more than what appears on the surface. Rhys conveys the island culture, exposes its people and classes, but she also penetrates the psyche of a proud and brutal British colonist as well as the inner realm of fear and desire belonging to his prey: a woman and a culture in flux, both more wronged against than the other way around.
The reader looking for a sequel to "Jane Eyre" is bound to be initially disappointed. Bronte establishes a style that, among its excellences, comes to represent an authoritative narrator and a decidedly confident Western point of view (albeit from a woman's angle of vision rather than a man's). By contrast, Rhys' style is so different as to strike the first-time reader as that of someone speaking, writing, and thinking in a language other than English--a language that the reader only gradually recognizes as his own.
But that's much the novel's point--the strangeness and disorientation resulting from the invasion of a defenseless island by a stable, civilized, patriarchal society frustrated by its inability to assert its customary order and, above all, control. The Bertha Mason the reader meets in this story may be disappointing, unrecognizable, a construction as far removed from Bronte's and the reader's experience as a character from a completely different world. But that's who Bertha Mason is, the "real" Bertha Mason--and her difference should in no way exclude her from the reader's sympathy, curiosity, and desire to know more about her. Unlike the unnamed Rochester (who is certainly no less a stranger, especially to himself, than Bertha), the challenge for the reader (and all of us) is to learn from her and through her--the better to know ourselves.
Though we may find the nightly television images from Haiti disturbing, we cannot afford to avert our eyes, to close our pocketbooks, to dissociate ourselves from the people of Haiti even as they die festering in the streets awaiting the bulldozers to plough them under. Bronte had some vague notion of the painful consequences of depriving others of their freedom, running heedlessly over their identities, and finally simply hiding them in some dark attic and throwing away the key. Paradoxical as it may seem, this latest catastrophe may be a first step toward unlocking the door. Contrary to Robertson, Limbaugh, and some of the other false prophets who purport to have access to higher wisdom, Haiti may not be God's punishment but our opportunity. The punishment could come should we fail to act to right a situation that next time could be much worse--and closer to our own shores.
[Note: Despite Amazon's reference to the edition (above), this is the novel by Jean Rhys.]
Prisoner of the mind and historyDecember 8, 2009 L. S. Evensen(CA United States) 1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This short and exquisite novel is a study of manners, race and culture. It is not only about the restrictions of marriage and English culture but the wounds and mistrust lingering in the minds of the colonized and the slaveholding classes. Miss Rhys grew up in the West Indies, mother was Creole, her father Welsh, and it is doubtless that she saw and felt these contradictions.
She describes with such poignancy and economy the beauty and newness of the forested island, the always-inhabited shadows of night, the lush and almost hard green of the tropics and the shock that florid life presents to English eyes. The newly-emancipated and dirt-poor blacks who serve the whites and the fearful English 'youngest son' who marries the innocent girl (for a price) confront one another. They are prisoners on this island, having no money, no status, no safety, suspect the others' motives and seem not quite human to each other. The feeling that one can lose one's footing at any moment is skillfully hinted at throughout the story and a fall into madness is possible for every character.
WowDecember 8, 2009 Dr. K(USA) 0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Wow is all I can say after reading this book. The treatment of the so-called "mad woman" makes me soo mad! But this review is just about the Norton Critical Edition. Let me first say that you have to read Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre before you read WSS. This version of the book is bigger than the original version, but the notes provided at the bottom of the pages are great they really explain many of the concepts of the book. I personally didn't read the essays and such so they were of no use to me. If you don't want the extra insight (provided by the notes), then i suggest getting a different version.
If you are someone who has read Jane Eyre (just to read it), you must read WSS. It gives the "crazy woman" a voice. But be warned..you will not finish the book with the 'warm & fuzzies'.
far outDecember 3, 2009 Winnie Sarr(nh) 0 out of 1 found this review helpful
I bought this book upon recommendation of a friend, but I didn't have enough background knowledge of Barbados to understand the bias and bigotry that the characters were involved in. Interesting style of writing, though, and a clever premise.
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