The story unfolds in colonial Jamaica and Dominica. Here, in Wide Sargasso Sea, the ‘other side’ was at the centre of a powerful, poetic narrative. It hadn’t occurred to me that what I knew was an ‘other side’. I’d walked into nights that seemed warm and welcoming, knowing that something might be waiting in the soft darkness. I’d grown up turning over logs and checking for spiders and snakes, shaking insects out of my clothes. That monster crab by the pool in the second part of the novel? Well, I’d swum in rivers shivering at the thought of the bullrouts that might be hiding in the rocks beneath me. I’d never been to the West Indies, but this subtropical setting I knew: the frangipani and the cicadas. On first reading, I was struck by the presence of the physical landscape, and by its familiarity. And by giving her a voice, Rhys creates a context for her madness. She captures the ugly essence of a whole colonial history through Antoinette’s vulnerability. Rhys exposes complicated relationships between gender, race and class. This, for me, is the heart of the novel’s greatness. I thought I’d try to write her a life.’ In Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys gives her her own name – Antoinette Cosway – and has her declare: ‘There is always the other side’. Rhys disagreed with the way Brontë drew Bertha, saying, ‘She seemed such a poor ghost. Wide Sargasso Sea is the story of Bertha Rochester, the mad woman in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. So my introduction to postcolonial literature, especially that written by women, opened my eyes. Literature, as I understood it, was produced by a select few. At school I had read Dickens, Shakespeare, Yeats, Fitzgerald, but in the years before I went to university, I read little, beyond a few Australian authors and no writers from other former colonies.

When I first read Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys I was just twenty years old.

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