“She seemed such a poor ghost, I thought I'd like to write her a life”, Rhys explained of her feelings for the first Mrs Rochester. It’s a novel that evokes a vivid sense of place, immersing the reader in the intoxicating lushness of its Caribbean setting it’s hard to put down and impossible to forget and of course it provides a potent heroine, plucked half-formed from the shadowy margins of one of literature’s best-loved romances, a woman whose tragic end comes to seem almost triumphant in light of all that precedes it. In giving a voice and an identity to Mr Rochester’s first wife, Antoinette – aka Bertha, the madwoman in the attic – the novel has become a gateway text to post-colonial and feminist theory.įor our insomniac listeners, this story of the couple’s meeting and ill-fated marriage, narrated in part by Antoinette, as yet a wealthy young Creole beauty, and in part by her domineering, cash-strapped new husband, Englishman Edward Rochester, offered more straightforward pleasures.

One of these was a slender, quietly published novel that dared to take on a bulky 19th Century classic and is currently celebrating its 50th anniversary: Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea.Īs any English literature student will tell you, Rhys’s iconic prequel to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is rich in motifs and devices both modernist and postmodernist. We had some regular callers, and we had a few titles that, whatever the show’s theme in any given month, would crop up again and again.

Jane eyre book cover