Wide Sargasso Sea bu Jean Rhys

This is a Parnassus Book recommendation, and I felt slightly handicapped reading it, having not read the book which it spins off from. It is a retelling of Jane Eyre from the point of view of Mr Rochester’s first wife – the mad woman in the attic. This is an imagining of what happened to her, how she ended up with Mr. Rochester, and what went terribly wrong. The settung is Jamaica in the 1830’s, and it starts with the disturbing childhood of Antoinette (Bertha) Cosway. White descendants of slave owners, Antoinette’s family is initially impoverished after emancipation until her mother remarries. Her stepfather sets Antoinette up with a decent fortune to attract a young Englishman and the majority of the novel focusses on the deterioration of her marriage during their honeymoon--and then he puts it all in his son-in-law's hands "because I trust him". Her mother questioned the wisdom of that, leaving her daughter at her husband's command rather than retaining some control of her personal fortune, and that is the moral of the story as far as I am concerned. Never give up control of your purse strings, especially if it is not required. This is the book that revived Rhys' career, and it is an idea I would like to see pursued more often--it is common with Austen novels in every possible way, which I happen to love--and would like to see something similar with other classics.