Jean Rhys's spell-binding novel Wide Sargasso Sea, inspired by Jane Eyre and winner the Royal Society of Literature Award is beautifully repackaged as part of the Penguin Essentials range.
During those years she had accumulated the stories collected in T.
Jean Rhys dropped from sight until nearly twenty years later she was discovered living reclusively in Cornwall.
None of these books was particularly successful and with the outbreak of war they went out of print.
This was followed by Quartet (originally Postures, 1928), After Leaving Mr Mackenzie (1930), Voyage in the Dark (1934) and Good Morning, Midnight (1939).
Her first book, a collection of stories called The Left Bank, was published in 1927.
A tale of dislocation and dispossession, which Rhys writes with a kind of romantic cynicism, desperate and pungent'
The Times '
Rhys turns a menacing cipher into a grieving, plausible young woman, and one whose story says whole worlds about global mixtures, about the misunderstandings between the colonized, the colonizers and the people who can't easily say which they are'
Time Jean Rhys was born in Dominica in 1890, the daughter of a Welsh doctor and a white Creole mother, and came to England when she was sixteen. '
Compelling, painful and exquisite'
Guardian '
Brilliant.
Set against the lush backdrop of 1830s Jamaica, Jean Rhys's powerful, haunting masterpiece was inspired by her fascination with the first Mrs Rochester, the mad wife in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre.
He forces Antoinette to conform to his rigid Victorian ideals, unaware that in taking away her identity he is destroying a part of himself as well as pushing her towards madness.
Initially drawn to her beauty and sensuality, he becomes increasingly frustrated by his inability to reach into her soul.
What am I doing in this place and who am I?'
If Antoinette Cosway, a spirited Creole heiress, could have foreseen the terrible future that awaited her, she would not have married the young Englishman.
Now they have taken everything away. '
There is no looking glass here and I don't know what I am like now...
Jean Rhys's spell-binding novel Wide Sargasso Sea, inspired by Jane Eyre and winner the Royal Society of Literature Award is beautifully repackaged as part of the Penguin Essentials range
