A postcolonial novel that beings in Jamaica, The Wide Sargasso Sea tells the story of Antoinette Cosway who marries an unnamed English gentleman. In 1966, more than a century later, another authoress by the name of Jean Rhys wrote The Wide Sargasso Sea. At this time Jane almost dies, and you can’t help but feel that if it weren’t for the evil being in Rochester’s attic that everything would end happily ever after.īut Rochester’s is not the only side of the story.īrontë wrote Jane Eyre in 1847. She escapes the life of impropriety that he offers her and leaves the all-encompassing love he provides her. Though it is a loveless union, his spouse inarticulate and almost inhuman, their marriage still stands and Jane flees. Jane finds out almost too late that Rochester is married. Rochester hides a secret, and she is kept in his attic. Their romance blooms, many-layered and complex, but having read this book before I knew they were headed for misfortune. Rochester is quick-tempered and brooding, and when he asks Jane one night if she thinks him handsome she unabashedly answers, “No.” Jane herself has never been declared as beautiful, but Rochester begins to endearingly call her “elf” and “sprite” and suggests that she is from the land of Faerie. Just when Jane is settling into a quiet life with the other servants and her charge, the master of the house arrives. Her close friend dies but Jane survives, becomes a teacher, and moves onto life as a governess for the French child Adèle at the English manor of Thornfield. I was quickly caught up in the trials of young Jane, with no kin to love her, who is sent to a school beset with consumption and tuberculosis. Brontë’s language is both sweeping and precise, lyrical and dark.
I was surprised and enchanted to find that, with so many other books and life experiences between, it is like reading the book anew.
I recently began to reread Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre after a gap of (I’m ashamed to say) more than ten years.
LAMP/Library of Accessible Media for Pennsylvanians
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