Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

Peter Hulme (University of Essex)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 4.1.1: Anglophone Writing and Culture of Central America and the Caribbean.
Vol. editors: Ronald Cummings (McMaster University), Delphine Munos (Université de Liège), Melanie Otto (Trinity College Dublin), Jak Peake (University of Essex), Abigail Ward (University of Nottingham)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1966

Places

Dominica (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel

Resources

Jean Rhys might have started writing what became Wide Sargasso Sea shortly after her return from Dominica in 1936, the one return visit she made to the island of her birth after leaving it as a teenager in 1907. Some of this writing was destroyed by Rhys, but other parts of it may have survived and gradually been added to under the vague title of “Creole,” a token of her desire eventually to write about her memories of the West Indies. According to a letter Rhys sent to Francis Wyndham in 1958, the previous year it had “clicked in her head” that this material could in fact be turned into a novel about “the first Mrs Rochester,” the shadowy West Indian character in Charlotte Brontë's novel, Jane Eyre (1847). …

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1865 words

Citation: Hulme, Peter. "Wide Sargasso Sea". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 12 January 2001 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=8787, accessed 24 April 2024.]

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