Wide Sargasso Sea

In her brilliant novel, Jean Rhys rescues the madwoman in the attic from Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre and brings her to life as the beautiful and tragic Antoinette Cosway. The story takes us to Antoinette's beguiling Caribbean island, a lush and ravaged Eden ripped apart by escalating tensions between the former slaves and the Creole heiress's colonial family. Antoinette's marriage to a visiting Englishman seems to promise escape from the island's violent distress. But the lovers' intense affair takes a sinister turn before the honeymoon is over, as they become caught in a haunting and passionate tangle of rumour, history and betrayal.