Although Wide Sargasso Sea was set almost entirely in the Caribbean, its first critics were more interested in its links with the Victorian classic, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847), for it told the story of Rochester's mad wife kept in the attic of Thornfield Hall. The point that Jean Rhys' book was a radical revaluation of Jane Eyre and its European attitudes from the perspective of a West Indian Creole was largely missed. (p. 111)
As Proust knew, memory can intensify and make clearer childhood experience, and it is no paradox that Jean Rhys' novel furthest in time from her Caribbean life should also be her most profoundly West Indian. The speech rhythms, the total imaginative context, from the sense impressions to the minutiae of social relationships, have an accuracy that give particular pleasure to those intimate with the Caribbean, and this is validated by the relevance of the themes to aspects of West Indian culture. Jean Rhys' vision is not that of Edward Brathwaite, although in important ways the two do overlap—notably both reject European materialism in favour of the vitality of the black folk culture. Yet Caribbean culture can never be narrowed to one perspective. (p. 112)
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