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Wide Sargasso Sea Study Guide & Plot Synopsis

This Study Guide consists of approximately 97 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of Wide Sargasso Sea.
This section contains 1,819 words
(approx. 7 pages at 300 words per page)
Purchase our Wide Sargasso Sea Study Guide

Wide Sargasso Sea Summary & Study Guide Description

Wide Sargasso Sea Summary & Study Guide includes comprehensive information and analysis to help you understand the book. This study guide contains the following sections:

This detailed literature summary also contains Further Reading and a Free Quiz on Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys.

Wide Sargasso Sea Plot Summary

Preview of Wide Sargasso Sea Summary:

Part I

Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea attempts to fill in the blanks of a fictional character's life story. Here Rhys creates a biography for Bertha Mason, the insane wife of Edward Rochester in Charlotte Bronte's novel Jane Eyre. As Rhys's novel begins, Bertha Mason, known through most of the narrative as Antoinette Cosway, is a child living on the overgrown and impoverished Coulibri Estate in Jamaica.

The story begins in 1839, six years after slavery was abolished in the British Empire, of which Jamaica was part. Antoinette, the young narrator of Part I, describes both her family's isolation and poverty in the wake of emancipation. She lives alone with her mother Annette, her brother Pierre, and three black servants, Christophine, Godfrey, and Sass, on the sprawling, but crumbling Cosway family plantation. No neighbors visit the family because Annette Cosway, who was born on Martinique, is considered an outsider. The family's...
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This section contains 1,819 words
(approx. 7 pages at 300 words per page)
Purchase our Wide Sargasso Sea Study Guide
Copyrights
Wide Sargasso Sea from BookRags and Gale's For Students Series. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.
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