Wide Sargasso Sea
12 January 2016
Territory Rights — Worldwide excluding Canada and the British Commonwealth.
Description
This “tour de force” (New York Times Book Review) celebrates its 50th anniversary.
Wide Sargasso Sea, a masterpiece of modern fiction, was Jean Rhys’s return to the literary center stage. She had a startling early career and was known for her extraordinary prose and haunting women characters. With Wide Sargasso Sea, her last and best-selling novel, she ingeniously brings into light one of fiction’s most fascinating characters: the madwoman in the attic from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. 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.
A new introduction by the award-winning Edwidge Danticat, author most recently of Claire of the Sea Light, expresses the enduring importance of this work. Drawing on her own Caribbean background, she illuminates the setting’s impact on Rhys and her astonishing work.
Reviews
"A considerable tour de force by any standard… A triumph of atmosphere." — New York Times Book Review
"The distillation of [Rhys's] life and craft… Nowhere is her prose more supple, more assured." — Sara Paretsky, “You Must Read This,” NPR
"Working a stylistic range from moody introspection to formal elegance, Miss Rhys has us traveling under Antoinette’s skin. It is an eerie and memorable trip." — The Nation
Also By: Jean Rhys 
Voyage in the Dark: A Novel
Paperback, 2023
“Prescient and technically astonishing.” —Geoff Dyer, GQ
Quartet: A Novel
Paperback, 2020
“[Quartet’s] abiding power arises from [Jean Rhys’s] ability to convey the complex vectors of desire and repulsion that move between the characters, distorted by the intractable demands of...
After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie
Paperback, 2020
“Lucid, exact, and swift.… An essential part of the [Rhys] record.” —V. S. Naipaul, New York Review of Books
Good Morning, Midnight
Paperback, 2020
“As sharp and lucent and alarming as a piece of broken crystal.”— Deborah Eisenberg, author of Your Duck Is My Duck
Quartet
Paperback, 1999
The story of a woman on the edge caught in the stranglehold between her lover and his wife. When her husband is released from prison, the situation explodes.