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Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys. Her last and most famous novel, the one that brought Jean Rhys widespread critical and commercial success, reviving her literary career and reputation when she was all but forgotten, "Wide Sargasso Sea" is justly praised, it's a haunting, wonderful novel, but it's not my favorite. I can see why it's generally considered her crowning achievement. In "Wide Sargasso Sea," she achieved an autobiographical distance and detachment from her fictional creation that she didn't manage to keep nearly so well in her other novels. This objectivity makes for better "art," so the thinking goes, but it's precisely the autobiographical engagement in her work, the confessional immediacy that I most appreciate. As a result, fantastic as it is, "Wide Sargasso Sea," ends up being "just" another story.

But, no, that's not quite right either. Because Antoinette is still Jean Rhys: a woman of mixed blood raised in the Virgin Islands who never feels she truly belongs anywhere. It is one of the embarrassing holes in my English Literature education that I never read Charlotte Bronte's "Jane Eyre". I was always more an Emily Bronte kind of girl, obsessive and masochistic, tragic and morbidly romantic,  attracted to the dark and brooding Heathcliff braying like a werewolf with barely contained homicidal violence on the moors or in the drawing room—oh the thrill imagining what he'd do if only he could get his hands on me! Anyway, like my preference for Dostoyevsky over Tolstoy, I favored Emily over Charlotte and therefore I don't know first-hand "Jane Eyre," the novel that Rhys wrote "Wide Sargasso Sea" to compliment. Antoinette is meant to be the mad wife locked away in Rochester's attic and "Wide Sargasso Sea" is the untold story of what happened to cause her to lose her mind.

What happened to Antoinette is hardly straightforward. She is the daughter of a white English father and a beautiful mixed-blood island mother. You might say she is the product of the disastrous colonization of the West Indies by the English, who exploited and enslaved the native population, growing rich and despised. When slavery was at last abolished, the whites found themselves a hated minority, no longer welcome in the land they called home. 

But they stayed, growing more and more insular, sticking with their own for survival. Then Antoinette's father dies and her mother—neither wholly white nor wholly black, same as Antoinette—finds herself rejected by both white and black society. Isolated and ostracized, her mother slowly goes mad, but not before marrying another white man. And a rich one at that. 

It's this stepfather's money that Antoinette eventually inherits and that makes her the target of a plot by her half-brother who intends to wrest the fortune from her. Enter Rochester. He will marry Antoinette with his eye on the prize: her inheritance. At least that is the way it seems from one point of view. But this is ultimately what makes "Wide Sargasso Sea" such a compelling read. Events are very much open to interpretation. There are moments when it seems entirely plausible that Rochester does—or would—love Antoinette if he didn't feel that Antoinette is desperate  for love and that he is as incidental to her as she—as a rich pigeon—supposedly is to him. It seems entirely plausible that both Antoinette and Rochester have such a deep need to be loved that neither can love or trust that they are loved for who they are. And so, their hastily concocted marriage swiftly falls apart amidst scheming, spiteful servants, voodoo magic, and lascivious native chambermaids. 

There is more than a little touch of Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" in these pages. Completely unprepared, Rochester has entered a lush, tropical world where everything is heat, beauty, disorder, and cruelty. His own world is rational, cool, well-proportioned, English. He's fighting not to lose his head in this jungle, figuratively, and maybe even literally. The place has got him spooked. As has Antoinette. But by the time he has her back on a ship to England, she's been whipped. He's found her weakness, exploited it mercilessly, and prevailed. She will end up in an attic room where she has frightened and haunted the readers of "Jane Eyre" ever since.

It's not really accurate to say that "Wide Sargasso Sea" is not as personal a book as, say, "Good Morning, Midnight," but the personal is more deeply buried, more successfully transformed; in this case, Rhys not only creates a character clearly distinguishable from herself, but she borrows one from another author altogether, albeit reanimating Charlotte Bronte's creation with new life—Rhys's life, more or less. Actually, less. From at least one point of view, this is the mark of a mature artist. I'm willing to concede that it may well be, but, if so, it is at the cost of the raw urgency that drives Rhys's other novels, the books where she speaks out to us unfiltered by fictional screens, directly from the page, without masks or masquerades, in all her anger, pathos, sadness, and black humor. That Rhys is unlike any other writer; and the one that I will always love best.