Books Left: 94
Current Book: Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

This entry contains spoilers for the novel Jane Eyre.

Here’s the thing about Wide Sargasso Sea. I read it for school, for this odd class called “Fiction” in which our professor had us read four sets of two novels: one older novel, and one more recent work. Each pair related to each other in some way. One of the pairs was Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea.

I didn’t want to like Wide Sargasso Sea because I loved Jane Eyre and I knew what Wide Sargasso Sea was about before reading it. I wanted to believe that Rochester was truly tricked into marrying some certifiably crazy lady. When I read Wide Sargasso Sea I had to make myself believe that Antoinette was in no way actually the same person as the woman in the attic. I read it as though the two books were just coincidentally similar. I refused to let Jean Rhys’s more-politically-correct-than-thou post-colonial attitude destroy my enjoyment of the 19th century classic.

Approaching this book for the second time, I realized I didn’t remember anything about it except that the existence of it bothered me. It’s place in the literary canon bothered me, because it was based on something else and it’s not like all those Pride and Prejudice “sequels” are going to be taught in school anytime soon. I didn’t want to read it again. I just wanted to write it off the top 100 list and be done with it.

I’m reading it again, and I’ve discovered two things:

1. Antoinette/Bertha really is kind of crazy. She’s kind of hard to relate to in the book because the parts that are written from her perspective are very muddled. This could also be because she’s young, but I like to think that when I was her age I had a clearer head than that.
2. This book is incredibly well written.