Jean Rhys was the West Indian author of Wide Sargasso Sea, a novel inspired by Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre reconstructing the early life of Mr Rochester's mad first wife and lending a postcolonial twist to the canon classic. Rhys was born in 1890 on the island of Dominica. Originally named Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams, her father was Welsh and her mother Creole and her experience as a white Creole woman influenced her greatly. Educated in Dominica, she moved to London to work as a chorus girl when she was only 16, later moving to Paris. The English novelist Ford Madox Ford encouraged her to write and her first publication was a collection of short stories The Left Bank (1927). Through a series of novels Rhys found acclaim writing about Europe's bohemian world of 1920s and 1930s. After three marriages, she moved to the West Country living in poverty and avoiding literary circles before being rediscovered by a radio company and returning to public life. A self-destructive alcoholic, she died in Devon in 1979 leaving an unfinished autobiography Smile Please.
The central theme of Rhys's work was that of a lone, victimized woman endeavouring to survive in an aggressive male dominated, sexually charged world, as in Postures (1928 – reprinted as Quartet in 1969) and After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1931). Her unique modernist style was established in Voyage in the Dark (1934), which included references to her childhood in the Caribbean and placed an emphasis on the lyrical beauty of language rather than plot and character development. Good Morning, Midnight (1939) was a stylistically innovative work about a middle-aged woman's negotiation of sexuality, life and her own cynicism.
Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) gained her international acclaim as a tale of conflicting cultures when the young Creole woman Antoinette Cosway marries the inhibited and controlling (and unnamed) Edward Rochester, cast adrift from family into the colonies. Rhys contrasts the apparent verve and radiance of the black community with the sterility of white society. Set after the emancipation of slaves, racial tension underpins the drama as when Rochester re-names her “Bertha” in an attempt to own her. Antoinette is a white Creole, neither acceptable to the black or white populations, she is displaced and alienated, surviving through an attachment to natural wilderness. Wide Sargasso Sea has become a central text of studies in colonialism, postcolonialism, race and gender politics though Rhys's own attitude is sometimes ambiguous. Subverting Jane Eyre to reveal the hypocrisy of English society and the nature of European domination in the Caribbean is a postcolonial strategy of rewriting the Western canon, exploring the narrative gaps and silences, as an act of liberation in finally being able to write the self.