Wide Sargasso Sea

Brassai, Cathedral, ca. 1930

By Jean Rhys, New York, WW Norton & Co., 1985

After a break from writing for over twenty years, Rhys wrote Wide Sargasso Sea in the 1960s, and it reads like a delirious nightmare.  The sensibility is the same--this is clearly a Jean Rhys work--and she reimagines Jane Eyre from the perspective of Grace Pool.  Pow!  It is like a brilliant hallucination.  Her concern for those passed over as marginal, crazy, or foreign is fully evident here.  This is post-colonial literature in the best tradition of "the empire strikes back."  (Although, the heroine is a white Creole.  This isn't The Beloved.)  The novel bursts forth with the fully realized power of a distinctly alternative view point.