Wide Sargasso Sea

Wide Sargasso Sea is a 1966 postmodern novel by Dominican-British author Jean Rhys. Set in Jamaica in the 1830s–1840s, the novel is a postcolonial and feminist prequel to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847), detailing the background to Edward Rochester's marriage from the point of view of his wife Bertha Mason, Brontë's "madwoman in the attic", reimagined by Rhys as a Creole heiress named Antoinette Cosway.

Antoinette's story is told from the time of her youth in Jamaica, to her unhappy marriage to an English gentleman, Mr. Rochester, who renames her Bertha, declares her mad, takes her to England, and isolates her from the rest of the world in his mansion. Wide Sargasso Sea explores the power of relationships between men and women and discusses the themes of race, Caribbean history, and assimilation as Antoinette is caught in a white, patriarchal society in which she fully belongs neither to Europe nor to Jamaica.

The book was Rhys's first work after a period of literary obscurity beginning with her novel Good Morning, Midnight (1939). Wide Sargasso Sea led to a revival of interest in Rhys and became her most commercially successful novel. In 2022, it was included on the "Big Jubilee Read" list of 70 books by Commonwealth authors, selected to celebrate the Platinum Jubilee of Elizabeth II.