W W Norton Company</br></br>Product Description</br></br><p><strong>This tour de force (<em>New York Times Book Review</em>) celebrates its 50th anniversary.</strong></p><p><em>Wide Sargasso Sea</em> a masterpiece of modern fiction was Jean Rhyss return to the literary center stage. She had a startling early career and was known for her extraordinary prose and haunting women characters. With <em>Wide Sargasso Sea</em> her last and best-selling novel she ingeniously brings into light one of fictions most fascinating characters: the madwoman in the attic from Charlotte Bront?s <em>Jane Eyre</em>. This mesmerizing work introduces us to Antoinette Cosway a sensual and protected young woman who is sold into marriage to the prideful Mr. Rochester. Rhys portrays Cosway amidst a society so driven by hatred so skewed in its sexual relations that it can literally drive a woman out of her mind.</p><p>A new introduction by the award-winning Edwidge Danticat author most recently of <em>Claire of the Sea Light</em> expresses the enduring importance of this work. Drawing on her own Caribbean backg"ound?? she illuminates the setting??s impact on Rhys and her astonishing work.</p></br></br>Amazon.com Review</br></br>In 1966 Jean Rhys reemerged after a long silence with a novel called <I>Wide Sargasso Sea</I>. Rhys had enjoyed minor literary success in the 1920s and '30s with a series of evocative novels featuring women protagonists adrift in Europe?? verging on poverty?? hoping to be saved by men. By the '40s?? however?? her work was out of fashion?? too sad for a world at war. And Rhys herself was often too sad for the world--she was suicidal?? alcoholic?? troubled by a vast loneliness. She was also a great writer?? despite her powerful self-destructive impulses.<p>  <I>Wide Sargasso Sea</I> is the story of Antoinette Cosway?? a Creole heiress who grew up in the West Indies on a decaying plantation. When she comes of age she is married off to an Englishman?? and he takes her away from the only place she has known--a house with a garden where "re overgrown and a smell of dead flowers mixed with the fresh living smell. Underneath the tree ferns?? tall as forest tree ferns?? the light was green. Orchids flourished out of reach or for some reason not to be touched.">  The novel is Rhys's answer to <I>Jane Eyre</I>. Charlotte Bront?'s book had long haunted her?? mostly for the story it did not tell--that of the madwoman in the attic?? Rochester's terrible secret. Antoinette is Rhys's imagining of that locked-up woman?? who