What Wide Sargasso Sea Changes About Reading Jane Eyre

Spoiler note. This essay discusses the endings of both novels.

The first time through Jane Eyre, the interrupted wedding is a revelation about Rochester. He already has a wife, and he has kept her upstairs at Thornfield. After Wide Sargasso Sea, the same scene raises a different question. What is it like for the woman upstairs to have strangers brought into her room so her husband can show them what she has become?

Jean Rhys’s 1966 novel reimagines the woman Charlotte Brontë calls Bertha Mason as Antoinette Cosway, a white Creole woman who grows up in Jamaica after emancipation. Rhys gives her a childhood, a marriage and a voice of her own. Read together, the two novels make Thornfield’s locked room a test of whose account we trust, whose freedom we root for and what we’re willing to accept for Jane to have a happy ending.

The wedding scene tells us whose story we’re hearing

In Chapter 26 of Jane Eyre, Rochester takes the wedding party upstairs after his marriage to Jane is stopped. Jane’s narration describes Bertha in animal terms. In the next chapter, Rochester explains his first marriage at length. We hear how he believes he was deceived, how he came to despise his wife and how he justifies keeping her at Thornfield. Bertha gets no comparable opportunity to tell the story of their marriage.

Rhys changes the order in which we get to know her. Antoinette speaks first, long before her English husband enters the book. We meet her at Coulibri, the decaying estate where she grows up with her mother, Annette. We know what the house means to her before we see it burn. That early fire gives the last pages a history of their own. By the time Antoinette is locked away in England, fire already belongs to her memories of home and loss.

The wedding scene still works as a shock for Jane, who learns she has been kept in the dark. It also becomes a scene in which Rochester controls the room, the introductions and nearly everything the visitors are told about his wife.

Rochester’s version of the marriage becomes one version among several

Rhys gives much of the middle section to Antoinette’s husband, whom she leaves unnamed. He finds the Caribbean landscape unsettling and comes to treat his discomfort as evidence against his wife and the place she knows as home. When Daniel Cosway writes to him with allegations about Antoinette’s family, he gives those allegations a hearing. Antoinette’s account of her own life carries less weight with him.

The change in her name makes that imbalance audible. He calls her Bertha, and she objects. For readers of Jane Eyre, “Bertha” is already familiar, which makes the exchange especially uncomfortable. The name we accepted as a fact of Brontë’s novel becomes something we hear a husband imposing on his wife.

Christophine, a Black Martinican woman who has cared for Antoinette since childhood, challenges him directly. She presses him to let Antoinette go and return her money. The conversation brings the marriage down to practical questions. Who has the money? Who can leave? Who gets to decide where the other person lives? Rochester’s account at Thornfield sounds different once those questions are in view.

Jamaica changes what we notice about money and belonging

Brontë’s novel already connects its English story to fortunes made overseas. Rochester says Bertha brought £30,000 to their marriage. Jane’s own financial independence comes from an uncle in Madeira. Rhys spends time in a place that surfaces mostly through other people’s accounts in Brontë’s novel, showing what life at a former slaveholding estate looks like after emancipation.

Antoinette grows up isolated and vulnerable, and her family’s position is bound up with the violence of slavery. Both facts matter when you read the fire at Coulibri and Antoinette’s encounter with Tia, the girl she once played with. The girls’ closeness gives the scene its pain. The history of the estate gives the scene stakes beyond a childhood friendship. Rhys asks us to hold both in mind while we listen to Antoinette.

The two endings make different things visible

In Chapter 36 of Jane Eyre, Jane hears about Thornfield’s destruction after the fact. An innkeeper tells her that Bertha set the fire and died after jumping from the roof. By the time Jane reaches Rochester, the fire has already changed what their life together can be.

Rhys brings us back inside the house. Antoinette dreams of fire and of Tia. Then she wakes, takes a candle and goes into the passage. The book ends while she is still moving through the dark. Brontë gives us a witness’s report of what happened on the roof. Rhys leaves us with the woman carrying the candle and the memories she carries with it.

I’d read Jane Eyre first, then Wide Sargasso Sea, then return to Chapters 26, 27 and 36. Jane’s decision to leave Rochester still has its force. She refuses a life whose terms he has set for her. After Rhys, that refusal also draws attention to the woman upstairs, who has far less power to make the same choice.

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• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. Choose the Penguin Classics paperback with Stevie Davies’s introduction and notes if you want an annotated edition for the Thornfield reread.
• Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys. Choose the W. W. Norton paperback with Edwidge Danticat’s introduction for additional context on the novel’s Caribbean setting.

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