Wide Sargasso Sea: Student Edition (平装) 0141182857

在线阅读本书 Jean Rhys's late, literary masterpiece Wide Sargasso Sea was inspired by Charlotte Bronteuml;'s Jane Eyre, and is set in the lush, beguiling landscape of Jamaica in the 1830s. Born into an oppressive, colonialist society, Creole heiress Antoinette Cosway meets a young Englishman who is drawn to her innocent sensuality and beauty. After their marriage the rumours begin, poisoning her husband against her. Caught between his demands and her own precarious sense of belonging, Antoinette is driven towards madness. .com Review In 1966 Jean Rhys reemerged after a long silence with a novel calledWide Sargasso Sea. Rhys had enjoyed minor literary success in the1920s and '30s with a series of evocative novels featuring womenprotagonists adrift in Europe, verging on poverty, hoping to be saved bymen. By the '40s, however, her work was out of fashion, too sad for a worldat 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.

Wide Sargasso Sea is the story of Antoinette Cosway, a Creoleheiress who grew up in the West Indies on a decaying plantation. Whenshe comes of age she is married off to an Englishman, and he takes heraway from the only place she has known--a house with a garden where "thepaths were overgrown and a smell of dead flowers mixed with the freshliving smell. Underneath the tree ferns, tall as forest tree ferns, thelight was green. Orchids flourished out of reach or for some reason notto be touched."

The novel is Rhys's answer to JaneEyre. Charlotte Bront's book had long haunted her, mostly for thestory itdid not tell--that of the madwoman in the attic, Rochester's terriblesecret. Antoinette is Rhys's imagining of that locked-up woman, who inthe end burns up the house and herself. Wide Sargasso Sea followsher voyage into the dark, both from her point of view and Rochester's. Itis a voyagecharged with soul-destroying lust. "I watched her die many times,"observes the new husband. "In my way, not in hers. In sunlight, inshadow, by moonlight, by candlelight. In the long afternoons when thehouse was empty."

Rhys struggled over the book, enduring rejections and revisions,wrestling to bring this ruined woman out of the ashes. The slim volumewas finally published when she was 70 years old. The criticaladulation that followed, she said, "has come too late." Jean Rhys died afewyears later, but with Wide Sargasso Sea she left behind a greatlegacy, a work of strange, scary loveliness. There has not been a booklike it before or since. Believe me, I've been searching. --EmilyWhite--This text refers to the Paperback edition. Review Rhys was haunted by the figure of the first Mrs Rochester, the mad wife in the attic in Bronte's Jane Eyre. Antoinette Cosway is a Creole heiress, whose family traps the young Rochester into marrying her. Soon after the marriage, the rumours of insanity and inbreeding in her family turn him against her. Alone in the house on the Yorkshire moors, she succumbs to madness and is imprisoned in the attic, while downstairs, Jane Eyre is trying to steal her husband. (Kirkus UK)--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Jean Rhys was born in Dominica in 1894. Coming to England aged 16, she drifted into

出版社	Penguin Classics
作者	Jean Rhys