Wide Sargasso Sea: Jean Rhys

Jean Rhys is a literary one-off. Born in 1890 on the isolated island of Dominica, she was educated haphazardly and then, in her late teens, found herself having to cope single-handedly in Edwardian England. Lurching from pillar to post and man to man she eventually fetched up on the edge of the 'lost generation' of writers and artists who graced Paris in the 1920s. The outcome was extraordinary. Belonging to no school or closed literary coterie, she came to the craft of fiction without preconception. She relied instead upon her own ear and her innate literary tact and intelligence to produce a number of novels and short stories of the finest quality.

Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys' 'alternative' to Jane Eyre, is the most achieved of her works. Its deceptively simple prose is as finely wrought as that of any twentieth-century English novel and is more politically telling than immeasurably more feminist tracts.

About the author:

Born in London and educated at the Universities of Oxford and Southern California, Anthony Fowles has completed a full-length study of John Dryden and a study of Joseph Heller for Greenwich Exchange. He is also a writer of fiction, biography and literary criticism.

46  pages

ISBN: 978-1-906075-34-7