基本信息出版社：W W Norton & Co Ltd
页码：192 页
出版日期：1992年08月
ISBN：0393308804
条形码：9780393308808
装帧：平装
正文语种：英语
外文书名：藻海无边(小说)

内容简介 在线阅读本书

The fortieth anniversary reissue of the best-selling "tour de force" (Walter Allen, New York Times Book Review).

Jean Rhys's reputation was made upon the publication of this passionate and heartbreaking novel, in which she brings into the light one of fiction's most mysterious characters: the madwoman in the attic from Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre.

A sensual and protected young woman, Antoinette Cosway grows upin the lush natural world of the Caribbean. She is sold intomarriage to the coldhearted and prideful Rochester, who succumbsto his need for money and his lust. Yet he will make her pay forher ancestors' sins of slaveholding, excessive drinking, and nihilistic despair by enslaving her as a prisoner in his bleak English home.

In this best-selling novel Rhys portrays a society so driven by hatred, so skewed in its sexual relations, that it can literally drive a woman out of her mind.
作者简介 Jean Rhys was the author of five novels, including Wide Sargasso Sea. The heroines of her novels all have different names--Marya, Julia, Anna, Sasha and Antoinette--but they all share biographical details with their author, and they are all like her in some way: passionate, lonely, despairing, difficult, brilliant, manipulated and manipulating in turn. Her heroines grow directly out of her life, following her from one difficult situation to the next.

Born Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams on the island of Dominica in 1890, Jean Rhys took on many different names during her lifetime-stage names, pen names, married names. "Names are important," she writes in Wide Sargasso Sea. Her father, a doctor, was Welsh. Her mother was from a Scottish family that had lived on Dominica for generations-the family had owned slaves before the liberation in 1834. Rhys had a difficult childhood, but one filled with the beauty of the island. She left for England at seventeen, bound, she hoped, for a stage career.

Rhys began by studying at the Academy of Dramatic Arts, which she left to join the chorus of a popular musical, Our Miss Gibbs. Now calling herself variously Vivien, Emma, and Ella Gray, Rhys toured with the traveling production for three seasons. The heroine of Rhys's third novel, Voyage in the Dark, also toured with the chorus of a traveling show. Rhys met Lancelot Grey Hugh Smith during her years as a chorus girl. He was her first lover. The relationship lasted only eighteen months, but was in many ways her most lasting affair, and she wrote and rewrote its history in her short stories and in Voyage in the Dark.

Rhys stayed in London throughout World War I. After the armistice, she went to Paris to join (and marry) Jean Lenglet, a Dutch journalist. The Lenglets drifted around Europe together. Around this time, Ford Madox Ford took an interest in Rhys's writings, and pieces of hers began to appear in his magazine, the Transatlantic Review. Jean Lenglet was imprisoned for "offending against currency regulations," and Jean Rhys moved in with Ford Madox Ford and his lover, Stella. Rhys and Ford had an affair that finished her marriage and his relationship with Stella-the turmoil and its demise became the subject of Quartet.

After the breakup of these relationships, Rhys went through a difficult time, including the death of her mother. These events became Julia's story in After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie. Rhys then married Leslie Tilden Smith. Although these were Rhys's most productive writing years, they were also a bitter time of recrimination, insecurity, guilt, alcoholism, and violence. The bitterness of this characterizes Sasha in the last of these novels, Good Morning, Midnight, published in 1939. Leslie Tilden Smith died in 1945.

After the fourth novel, which, like its predecessors, met with critical acclaim but no popular success, Rhys disappeared. Many thought she had died. A radio company wished to make a radio program of Good Morning, Midnight and advertised for information in connection with Jean Rhys. She herself answered the ad. Francis Wyndham contacted her, suggesting that she write a book for the publishing house with which he was affiliated. Ever a perfectionist, Rhys took seven years to complete her beautiful novel Wide Sargasso Sea. It had been twenty-seven years since the publication of her last novel.

Wide Sargasso Seawas based largely on Rhys's childhood experiences in Dominica. Although she set the novel in Jamaica, much of the landscape and many of the people described were taken from her memory. Old Mr. Cosway, like Rhys's great-grandfather, owned slaves. Rhys's own mother, like Antoinette Cosway, married a man who came from off the island and did not quite understand its politics. Rhys's father, like Mr. Rochester, was an unlucky second son, exiled from his home in part because of a difficult relationship with his father. Rhys herself, like Antoinette, left a childhood paradise, albeit a treacherous one, for the cold, damp, cheerlessness of England.

Wide Sargasso Sea belatedly made Rhys's reputation. Rhys won the Royal Society of Literature Award and the W. H. Smith Award and was financially secure for the last thirteen years of her life. She enjoyed the praise and recognition, although she said it came "too late." In part because of Rhys's tendency to fictionalize her history, and in part because she was obscure for much of her life, there continues to be a great deal of confusion about her history. Hoping to set the record straight, Rhys began a series of autobiographical sketches, later published under the name Smile Please, but she died before she could complete them. Jean Rhys died in 1979 at the age of eighty-seven in Devonshire, England.
编辑推荐 Amazon.com Review
In 1966 Jean Rhys reemerged after a long silence with a novel called Wide Sargasso Sea. Rhys had enjoyed minor literary success in the 1920s and '30s with a series of evocative novels featuring women protagonists adrift in Europe, verging on poverty, hoping to be saved by men. By the '40s, however, her work was out of fashion, too sad for a world at war. And Rhys herself was often too sad for the world--she was suicidal, alcoholic, troubled by a vast loneliness. She was also a great writer, despite her powerful self-destructive impulses.

Wide Sargasso Sea is the story of Antoinette Cosway, a Creole heiress who grew up in the West Indies on a decaying plantation. When she comes of age she is married off to an Englishman, and he takes her away from the only place she has known--a house with a garden where "the paths were overgrown and a smell of dead flowers mixed with the fresh living smell. Underneath the tree ferns, tall as forest tree ferns, the light was green. Orchids flourished out of reach or for some reason not to be touched."

The novel is Rhys's answer to Jane Eyre. Charlotte Brontë's book had long haunted her, mostly for the story it did not tell--that of the madwoman in the attic, Rochester's terrible secret. Antoinette is Rhys's imagining of that locked-up woman, who in the end burns up the house and herself. Wide Sargasso Sea follows her voyage into the dark, both from her point of view and Rochester's. It is a voyage charged with soul-destroying lust. "I watched her die many times," observes the new husband. "In my way, not in hers. In sunlight, in shadow, by moonlight, by candlelight. In the long afternoons when the house was empty."

Rhys struggled over the book, enduring rejections and revisions, wrestling to bring this ruined woman out of the ashes. The slim volume was finally published when she was 70 years old. The critical adulation that followed, she said, "has come too late." Jean Rhys died a few years later, but with Wide Sargasso Sea she left behind a great legacy, a work of strange, scary loveliness. There has not been a book like it before or since. Believe me, I've been searching. --Emily White

Review
A triumph of atmosphere—of what one is tempted to call Caribbean Gothic atmosphere….It has an almost hallucinatory quality. -- The New York Times

Novel by Jean Rhys, published in 1966. A well-received work of fiction, it takes its theme from the novel Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. The book details the life of Antoinette Mason (known in Jane Eyre as Bertha), a West Indian who marries an unnamed man in Jamaica and returns with him to his home in England. Locked in a loveless marriage and settled in an inhospitable climate, Antoinette goes mad and is frequently violent. Her husband confines her to the attic of his house at Thornfield. Only he and Grace Poole, the attendant he has hired to care for her, know of Antoinette's existence. The reader gradually learns that Antoinette's unnamed husband is Mr. Rochester, later to become the beloved of Jane Eyre. Much of the action of the novel takes place in the West Indies. The first and third sections are narrated by Antoinette, the middle section by her husband. -- The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature

Working a stylistic range from moody introspection to formal elegance, Miss Rhys has us traveling under Antoinette's skin. -- The Nation