Jane Eyre

It is possible to read and enjoy Wide Sargasso Sea without any knowledge of its relationship to Jane Eyre but an important dimension of the story will be missing. It is certain that Jean Rhys herself expected that her readers had a passing knowledge of Charlotte Brontë’s novel even if they didn’t know it in detail. In an interview in 1979 Jean Rhys said that, on reading Jane Eyre as a child, she resented the way in which Creole women were represented as mad and that this inspired her to present Bertha’s life from an alternative perspective, giving her a fuller history. Locating the genesis of her novel so directly and immediately in childhood reading may be an exaggeration. She was an old lady when this interview was given and had been delivering varying versions of the sources of Wide Sargasso Sea for some time. In an interview in 1979 Jean Rhys said that, on reading Jane Eyre as a child, she resented the way in which Creole women were represented as mad and that this inspired her to present Bertha’s life from an alternative perspective, giving her a fuller history. Locating the genesis of her novel so directly and immediately in childhood reading may be an exaggeration. She was an old lady when this interview was given and had been delivering varying versions of the sources of Wide Sargasso Sea for some time.
What does seem to be true is that the novel took many years to write before its publication in 1966. The earliest reference to Wide Sargasso Sea is in one of Jean Rhys’ letters in 1945, although there are also indications that a manuscript of an earlier version called ‘Le Revenant’ was burnt during the war.
The link with Jane Eyre was made explicit in a letter in 1949 when Rhys explained that the title for a new novel she was working on would be ‘The First Mrs Rochester’. Although by 1949 she claimed that the novel was semi-completed with the remainder mentally worked out, surviving letters don’t raise it again until 1957, when she re-read Jane Eyre in a