Despite denials of imperialist themes in canonical works of British literature by critics such as Bernard Porter – who argues that the ‘tropical imagery’ of Jane Eyre is just an exotic flavouring to the conflict in its love story – the existence of colonialism is crucial to its narrative (Porter 171).

On the Making History website, Miri Rubin characterises this practice as ‘an approach which considers the domain of representation and the struggle over meaning.’ The novel is a valuable source because it highlights how the shifting ideologies of race and gender intersect with each other to create dominant cultural representations that remain so influential today.ĭissatisfied with Brontë’s portrait of the Caribbean as a Dominican-born white Creole, Rhys rewrote Antoinette’s story, bringing the marginalised elements of Jane Eyre to the centre. Wide Sargasso Sea ’s examination of the impact that colonial ideologies of race, gender, and class have on a personal relationship is highly relevant to the practice of cultural history.

This idea of the importance of alternative narratives inspired my university studies on history, gender and the complexities of cross-cultural interactions. I found this ‘other side’ by accident, and I felt frustrated that I had stumbled on the book by sheer luck and not through my academic curriculum.

One important line struck me: ‘There is always the other side, always.’ (106) I first encountered the novel when I was seventeen, five years after I had studied Jane Eyre at school, reading all its vivid, hallucinatory, and disturbing 156 pages in one sitting. She becomes Brontë’s ‘intemperate and unchaste’ creation who thwarts Jane’s marriage to Rochester, spiralling into madness and, eventually, arson and suicide (Brontë 270). In Rhys’ version of the story, Antoinette’s marriage to an unnamed Englishman in the 1830s unravels dramatically following revelations of her mother’s alleged promiscuity and mental disintegration. Rhys wrote the novel in response to Brontë’s oblique representation of the Caribbean and Mr Rochester’s first wife, investigating processes of oppression through the character of Antoinette Mason, renamed Bertha by her husband as a means of controlling her identity. Wide Sargasso Sea ( 1966) by Jean Rhys is a dark, compelling novel that charts the backstory of the infamous ‘madwoman in the attic’ of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), exploring themes of colonialism, gender, and power. There is always the other side, always (Rhys 106)

Wide sargasso sea audiobook