Wide Sargasso Sea and the Rewriting of Tradition

There are some books that don’t simply respond to literature—they seek to revise it, to dismantle the foundations of what came before. Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, published in 1966, is one such novel. Billed as a “prequel” to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Rhys’s novel imagines the backstory of Bertha Mason—the infamous “madwoman in the attic”—and in doing so attempts to flip the narrative on its head. But where critics see subversion, a conservative reader may reasonably see something else: a work of ideological revisionism, driven less by literary insight than by political grievance. Rhys’s novel is lush and moody,…