Wide Sargasso Sea was published by André Deutsch, London, on 24 October 1966, and by W.W. Norton, New York, in 1967. Rhys was seventy-six years old and had not published a book since Good Morning, Midnight in 1939. She had been presumed dead by the literary establishment until an advertisement placed in the New Statesman in 1957 elicited a response from her Devon cottage. The novel took nine years to write, through poverty, illness, and her husband’s death. It is now regarded as one of the great novels of the twentieth century.
The Novel
The novel is divided into three parts. Part One is narrated by Antoinette Cosway, a white Creole girl growing up on a decaying plantation in Jamaica in the 1830s, after the Emancipation Act has freed the enslaved population. Her father is dead, her mother is increasingly unstable, and the family is despised by both the Black community and the English planting class. The estate, Coulibri, is burned by a mob; Antoinette’s young brother Pierre dies in the fire; her mother goes mad and is confined.
Part Two is narrated largely by Antoinette’s unnamed husband — clearly Rochester from Jane Eyre, though Rhys never names him. He has married Antoinette for her dowry, and they honeymoon in the lush, disturbing landscape of Dominica. He is repelled by the tropics, by Antoinette’s sensuality, by the obeah (folk magic) practised by her nurse Christophine. When a letter arrives accusing Antoinette’s family of hereditary madness and racial mixture, he withdraws from her emotionally and sexually. He sleeps with a servant. He renames her “Bertha” — the English name that negates her Creole identity. He takes her to England and locks her in the attic.
Part Three, brief and hallucinatory, is narrated by Antoinette/Bertha from the attic room at Thornfield Hall. She does not know where she is. She dreams of fire — the fire that destroyed Coulibri, the fire she will set at Thornfield. The novel ends as she walks toward the flames, candle in hand, completing the circle.
Postcolonial Rewriting
Wide Sargasso Sea is the foundational text of postcolonial literary criticism. Rhys takes a character who exists in Jane Eyre as a plot device — the madwoman whose existence justifies Rochester’s bigamy — and gives her a name, a history, a psychology, and a culture. The “madness” that Brontë presents as given is shown to be produced: by colonialism, by patriarchy, by the specific mechanisms of a marriage market that treats women as property.
Rhys does not villainise Rochester exactly — Part Two shows his confusion and his genuine, brief attraction to Antoinette — but she shows how his Englishness, his entitlement, and his inability to tolerate what he cannot control destroy a woman who might, in other circumstances, have lived. The Sargasso Sea of the title — the mid-Atlantic region of dead calm — is the space between England and the Caribbean, between cultures, where Antoinette is suspended and lost.
Collecting Wide Sargasso Sea
First edition (1966, André Deutsch, London): Small first printing.
First US edition (1967, W.W. Norton).
Identification points:
- André Deutsch imprint for UK first
- First edition stated
- Dust jacket
Approximate market values:
- UK first (André Deutsch), Fine/Fine in jacket: $5,000–$15,000
- US first (Norton), Fine/Fine in jacket: $1,500–$4,000
- Signed first edition: $10,000–$30,000+ (very rare — Rhys was elderly and reclusive)
Value trajectory: Exceptional appreciation. The novel’s canonical status in both literary and postcolonial studies ensures permanent demand. Signed copies are extremely scarce — Rhys signed very few books, and she died in 1979. Fine copies of the André Deutsch first edition in dust jacket are trophy items. The book consistently outperforms expectations at auction.
The Madwoman’s Story
Wide Sargasso Sea permanently changed how readers experience Jane Eyre. It is no longer possible to read Brontë’s novel without wondering about Bertha Mason — who she was, how she got to the attic, what was done to her. Rhys did not just write a prequel; she wrote a critique that inhabits and transforms the original. The two novels now exist in a relationship that enriches both: Jane Eyre gives Wide Sargasso Sea its narrative scaffolding, and Wide Sargasso Sea gives Jane Eyre its guilty conscience.