“If I was bound for hell, let it be hell. No more false heavens. No more damned magic. You hate me and I hate you. We’ll see who hates best. But first, first I will destroy your hatred. Now. My hate is colder, stronger, and you’ll have no hate to warm yourself. You will have nothing.”

And that pretty much sums up the story. Wide Sargasso Sea is a tale of passion, and madness. Its a story from a time when slavery was abolished and slave traders were shunned from the community in Jamaica. A little girl grows up and finds herself alienated from society, growing up away from love, as certain events tear her family apart. A world of superstition and magic, a world of vivid colors is where our story is told. A world of hatred, and madness.

The story was written during a period of obscurity in Rhys' career between 1939's Good Morning Midnight and 1966 when this book was released. With an impending World War and economic crisis from the first still at large, the themes of Good Morning Midnight were deemed too depressing by critics and readers and drove her into isolation from the public eye. At such a moment, when she had almost given up writing, an advertisement requesting her whereabouts for permission to adapt her then-latest work into a theatrical presentation appeared in the newspaper. Her friendship with Selma Vaz Dias, the origin of the advertisement, eventually inspired her to begin writing again.

“I watched her die many times. In my way, not in hers. In sunlight, in shadow, by moonlight, by candlelight. In the long afternoons when the house was empty. Only the sun was there to keep us company. We shut him out. And why not? Very soon she was as eager for what's called loving as I was - more lost and drowned afterwards.”

Wide Sargasso Sea is written as a feminist, post-colonial prequel to Jane Eyre, one of the two central characters being Antoinette Cosway, shown as a devilish madwoman in the attic in the latter. The central themes are identity politics of the post-Emancipation era, and the story of the women who lived through them, the cultural taboo regarding mental health, and the superstitions of the time, that a slave-trader's daughter's identity is like a double-edged sword. And that love is merely one side of the coin, the other being hatred. I really enjoyed the experience. I hope you do too.