Recommendations
Books Like Wide Sargasso Sea
Postcolonial and Feminist Novels Like Wide Sargasso Sea
Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea gives voice to Bertha Mason — the woman Jane Eyre silences. These 8 novels share its project of recovering marginalized perspectives, its Caribbean setting or sensibility, and its refusal to accept the dominant narrative's version of who matters.
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Jane Eyre
by Charlotte Brontë
The novel that Wide Sargasso Sea rewrites and responds to — reading the two together is essential; Jane Eyre presents Bertha Mason as a monster whose existence is a plot obstacle for Jane's happiness, and Wide Sargasso Sea gives Bertha/Antoinette her history, her name, and her perspective; the two novels are in direct dialogue and neither can be fully understood without the other
- 2Buy
Beloved
by Toni Morrison
Sethe, a formerly enslaved woman, is haunted by the ghost of the daughter she killed to spare her from slavery — Morrison's Pulitzer Prize winner shares Wide Sargasso Sea's project of recovering the experience of people destroyed by the colonial system, and its use of supernatural elements to externalize historical trauma; the most important American novel in the same tradition
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Things Fall Apart
by Chinua Achebe
Okonkwo, an Igbo leader in Nigeria, faces the destruction of his culture by colonialism — Achebe's 1958 masterpiece shares Wide Sargasso Sea's project of giving interiority and dignity to people treated as objects by the colonial narrative; where Rhys responds to a specific English novel, Achebe responds to the entire tradition of English fiction about Africa
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Voyage in the Dark
by Jean Rhys
Anna Morgan, a young woman from the Caribbean adrift in Edwardian London — Rhys's 1934 novel is the most direct companion to Wide Sargasso Sea in its experience of displacement and cultural erasure; Anna is an earlier version of Antoinette, a Caribbean woman unmade by England before she can become herself
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The Farming of Bones
by Edwidge Danticat
A Haitian woman survives the 1937 massacre of Haitians ordered by the Dominican dictator Trujillo — Danticat's novel shares Wide Sargasso Sea's Caribbean setting, its interest in colonial and post-colonial violence against the poor and the racially marginal, and its lyrical prose style that refuses to make violence pornographic
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Corregidora
by Gayl Jones
Ursa Corregidora, a blues singer who carries the memory of sexual slavery in Brazil through four generations of women in her family — Jones's 1975 novel shares Wide Sargasso Sea's interest in the transmission of colonial trauma through women's bodies across generations, and in the inadequacy of conventional narrative to contain that transmission
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The Inheritance Games
by Jennifer Lynn Barnes
A teenager is named the sole heir of a billionaire's estate in a game that may have more layers than it appears — for readers who came to Wide Sargasso Sea through Jane Eyre and who are drawn to mysteries about women trapped in wealthy households they did not choose
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The Poisonwood Bible
by Barbara Kingsolver
A Baptist missionary moves his family to the Belgian Congo in 1959 — Kingsolver's novel shares Wide Sargasso Sea's project of showing colonialism from the perspective of those it colonizes, and its formal structure of multiple female narrators whose different perspectives together constitute a truth that no single narrator can see
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