Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (1966)

"Our garden was large and beautiful as that garden in the Bible," Antoinette says of the estate where she was raised, "but it had gone wild." She is a white Creole girl on a Jamaica that has just freed the people her family once enslaved, hated by the Black islanders for what her name means and scorned by the English who come to buy what is left of it. Jean Rhys, born in Dominica, wrote _Wide Sargasso Sea_ to give a country, a childhood, and a sanity to the woman Charlotte Brontë left raving in an attic: the first Mrs Rochester, the madwoman of _Jane Eyre_. The Englishman Antoinette marries is never named here. He renames her Bertha, carries her across the ocean to a cold locked room, and calls the result madness. Rhys calls it a sentence, handed down by empire and by marriage, and her prose holds you in the wide warm sea between her island and his England, so lush and disorienting you feel the ground soften and give way.