Book Club Guide

Wide Sargasso Sea

by Jean Rhys · 1966 · Literary Fiction

Key themes

Identity under colonialism — the self that is renamed and silenced
Rochester as the man who cannot see what he does not understand
Madness as a label imposed from outside

About this book

Set in Jamaica and Dominica in the 1830s, Bertha Mason — the mad wife in the attic of Jane Eyre — tells her own story before she is silenced and imprisoned by Rochester. Rhys's novel is one of the foundational texts of postcolonial fiction, a fierce rewriting of Charlotte Brontë's portrait of Creole womanhood from the inside.

Published in 1966, Rhys's final novel took her nearly twenty years to write. It won the W.H. Smith Prize and is now read alongside Jane Eyre in most A-level and university courses on British literature.

Discussion questions

Rhys gives Bertha Mason — the madwoman in the attic of Jane Eyre — a name (Antoinette), a history and a voice. What changes about your reading of both novels once Antoinette has told her own story?
Rochester is nameless in this novel, referred to only as 'my husband.' What does Rhys achieve by refusing him a name — and how does this function as a reversal of the power dynamic in Jane Eyre?
The novel moves between Antoinette's first-person voice and Rochester's. What do we learn from his sections that her perspective cannot tell us — and whose version do you ultimately believe?
Christophine is the novel's most powerful moral presence. What is Rhys saying through her — about what survived colonialism, about who has real knowledge, about whose voice cannot be silenced?
Wide Sargasso Sea is a postcolonial rewriting of a Victorian classic. What responsibility does a novel like this have to its source text — must it be fair to Brontë, or is appropriation the point?