Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea: plot, setting and the Dominica behind it

Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea takes one of the most famous minor characters in English fiction, the wife Mr Rochester keeps locked in the attic in Jane Eyre, and gives her a childhood, a name and a voice. Rhys was born on Dominica in 1890, left at 16, and spent decades in England before she wrote it. It came out in 1966, when she was in her seventies, and pulled her back out of years of obscurity. (Plenty of people had assumed she was dead.) Below: what happens, where it happens, how it answers Jane Eyre, and the island behind it.

What is Wide Sargasso Sea about?

Short answer: it’s Bertha Mason’s side of the story. In Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), Rochester’s first wife is a Creole woman from Jamaica, kept hidden at Thornfield Hall, and described more like an animal than a person. Rhys renames her Antoinette Cosway and follows her from girlhood in Jamaica to the attic.

It’s a book about money, race and belonging in the Caribbean just after slavery ended. Antoinette’s family were slave owners, now ruined. The formerly enslaved people around her resent her family, and the English treat her as an outsider. She belongs fully to neither Europe nor Jamaica. Her marriage is arranged around her money. And Rhys writes about how a man can decide a woman is mad, and then make it true. That’s the part that stays with people.

Wide Sargasso Sea plot summary

Three parts. Here’s what happens, spoilers and all.

Part One: Coulibri, Jamaica. Antoinette tells this part as a child. Her family’s sugar estate, Coulibri, is falling apart after the end of slavery, and her widowed mother, Annette, who is from Martinique, is isolated and poor. Annette marries a wealthy Englishman, Mr Mason. His new money angers the formerly enslaved people around the estate, and a crowd burns the house down. Antoinette’s younger brother, Pierre, dies as a result. Grief pushes Annette into breakdown, and Mason sends her away to be kept by caretakers who abuse her. Antoinette is sent to a convent school in Spanish Town.

Part Two: Granbois, Dominica. Antoinette is now married to a young Englishman. He’s never named; he’s Rochester. They honeymoon at Granbois, her mother’s family estate in the mountains of Dominica, outside the village of Massacre. He narrates most of this part. A man called Daniel Cosway, who says he’s Antoinette’s illegitimate half-brother, writes to him with stories of madness in her family and asks for money. Antoinette goes to her old nurse, Christophine, for an obeah potion to win back her husband’s love. It makes him ill instead, and turns him against her for good. He has an affair under her nose, starts calling her Bertha, and decides to take her to England.

Part Three: Thornfield Hall, England. Antoinette, now “Bertha,” is shut in the attic of a great house, guarded by a servant, Grace Poole. She has lost track of time. Richard Mason visits and she attacks him with a knife. She dreams of fire spreading through the house, and the novel ends as she wakes, takes a candle and goes out into the dark passage. If you’ve read Jane Eyre, you know what comes next.

The setting: why Dominica matters

Most of the novel takes place in Jamaica and England, but its center, the honeymoon in Part Two, is on Dominica, Rhys’s own island. Granbois is made up. Massacre is real: a town on Dominica’s west coast, north of Roseau. The French named it for a 1674 killing. Philip Warner, Governor of Antigua, murdered his half-brother “Indian” Thomas Warner, the son of an English colonist and a Kalinago woman, and colonists then killed about 100 people in the village. The novel barely touches the name, and study guides often point out how it hangs over the honeymoon anyway. Our Dominica guide has more on the Kalinago history.

The Dominica chapters are full of rain, forest and flowers; the couple arrive in a downpour. Her husband is overwhelmed by the place, and his fear of the island and his fear of his wife get hard to tell apart.

Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre

Rhys built her book out of details Brontë had already put in Jane Eyre. In Chapter XXVII, Rochester tells Jane how his marriage was made: his father “told me Miss Mason was the boast of Spanish Town for her beauty: and this was no lie.” In Chapter XXVI, on the day his wedding to Jane is stopped, he says to the room: “Bertha Mason is mad; and she came of a mad family; idiots and maniacs through three generations! Her mother, the Creole, was both a madwoman and a drunkard!” Then he takes them upstairs, where Jane sees her for the first time:

In the deep shade, at the farther end of the room, a figure ran backwards and forwards. What it was, whether beast or human being, one could not, at first sight, tell: it grovelled, seemingly, on all fours; it snatched and growled like some strange wild animal: but it was covered with clothing, and a quantity of dark, grizzled hair, wild as a mane, hid its head and face.

(Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, 1847, Chapter XXVI. Text from Project Gutenberg.)

Every piece of that gets answered in Wide Sargasso Sea: the Creole mother, the family “madness,” Spanish Town, the money, Grace Poole, the attic and the fire. Rhys doesn’t change what happens in Jane Eyre. She changes who’s telling it. Rochester’s account of a mad, violent wife becomes one side of a marriage, told by a frightened young man a long way from home.

For the Brontës themselves, and the house in Yorkshire where Jane Eyre was written, see our guide to the Brontë sisters and their books.

Should you read Jane Eyre first?

It helps, but you don’t have to. Wide Sargasso Sea stands on its own as a short novel about the Caribbean. If you know Jane Eyre you’ll catch more: the names, Grace Poole, the ending. If you read Jane Eyre afterward, you’ll probably never read Bertha’s scenes the same way again. Either order works. Just don’t skip one.

Who was Jean Rhys?

Year	Jean Rhys’s life
1890	Born Ella Gwendoline Rees Williams on Dominica, 24 August. Welsh doctor father; white Creole mother whose family had owned a sugar estate.
c. 1907	Leaves Dominica at 16 for school in Cambridge, England.
1934	Voyage in the Dark.
1936	Visits Dominica for the first time since leaving, with her second husband.
1939	Good Morning, Midnight. Then years of silence.
1949	Selma Vaz Dias advertises in the New Statesman to find her, hoping to adapt her work for radio. Rhys answers, and the contact helps lead to Wide Sargasso Sea.
1966	Wide Sargasso Sea is published.
1967	Wins the WH Smith Literary Award.
1978	Made a CBE.
1979	Dies in Exeter, England, on 14 May, aged 88. Her unfinished memoir, Smile Please, is published the same year.

Rhys’s Roseau house, on the corner of Cork Street and Independence Street, was where her family lived when they were in town. It later became a guesthouse, had a plaque on its mango tree, and was demolished in May 2020, as Polly Pattullo reported. So there’s no Rhys site left to visit on Dominica, which is a real loss.

Wide Sargasso Sea adaptations: the 1993 and 2006 films

Wide Sargasso Sea (1993). Directed by John Duigan, written by Duigan, Carole Angier and Jan Sharp, with Karina Lombard as Antoinette and Nathaniel Parker as Rochester. Rachel Ward plays Annette, Michael York plays Mr Mason, and a young Naomi Watts has a small part. According to the AFI Catalog, production began in Jamaica in July 1991. It opened in the US on 16 April 1993 with an NC-17 rating for its sexual content. Reviews were mixed: 65 percent of the 20 critics’ reviews counted by Rotten Tomatoes are positive.

Wide Sargasso Sea (2006). A television film made by Kudos for BBC Wales, written by Stephen Greenhorn and directed by Brendan Maher. Rebecca Hall plays Antoinette, Rafe Spall plays Rochester and Nina Sosanya plays Christophine. It was first shown on BBC Four on 9 October 2006 and repeated on BBC One. We couldn’t confirm where it was filmed, so we’ve left that out rather than guess.

Other versions: Sargasso: A Caribbean Love Story (1991, directed by Michael Gilkes); a chamber opera with music by Brian Howard (1997); a ten-part BBC Radio 4 reading adapted by Margaret Busby and read by Adjoa Andoh (2004); and a one-hour Radio 4 drama by Rebecca Lenkiewicz (2016).

Reputation

Wide Sargasso Sea won the WH Smith Literary Award in 1967. It was number 94 on the Modern Library’s 100 best novels (1998), on Time’s list of the 100 best English-language novels since 1923 (2005), number 53 in the BBC’s 100 greatest British novels (2015), and number 10 on The Times’ 50 best novels of the past 70 years (2022).

More books set in the Caribbean

If you want to keep going after Wide Sargasso Sea, these are on our group’s list for the Windward Islands:

• Phyllis Shand Allfrey, The Orchid House (1953). A white Creole family on a thinly disguised Dominica, told by their Black nurse. Allfrey founded the Dominica Labour Party in 1955.
• Jean Rhys, Smile Please (1979). Her memoir; the early chapters are her Dominica childhood.
• Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place (1988). A short, angry book about Antigua and tourism. See our Antigua guide.
• Maryse Condé, Windward Heights (1995). Wuthering Heights retold in Guadeloupe and Cuba, a natural partner to this one. (Brontë fans, see our guide to the Wuthering Heights locations.)
• Joseph Zobel, Black Shack Alley (1950). A boy growing up on a Martinique sugar estate. See our Martinique guide.
• Caryl Phillips, Cambridge (1991). An Englishwoman’s account of her father’s sugar estate, set against the account of an enslaved man on it. Phillips was born on St Kitts.

Reading it before you go

Wide Sargasso Sea is one of the books our group reads before Mermaids, Pirates and Poets (Caribbean Sail), our week on the Royal Clipper in January 2028. The ship calls at Cabrits, in Dominica’s north, on Monday 17 January. Roseau is about an hour’s drive south and Rhys’s house is gone, so the shore stop that day is a rowing boat up the Indian River and Fort Shirley, not a Rhys site. I’d rather be straight about that now. You’ll still see the rivers, forest and mountains that fill Part Two, and that’s the bit of the book that really belongs to the island.