Re-reading again now in this, the fiftieth anniversary year of its first publication in 1966, I can’t help feeling that Wide Sargasso Sea remains just as groundbreaking and heartbreaking. I underwent something of a conversion then, acquiring and devouring each of Rhys’ earlier works and the last, a posthumous collection of memoir sketches, Smile Please, edited by Diana Athill.

When I chanced one day upon a copy of Wide Sargasso Sea in Sappho Books or Gleebooks Secondhand, I was instantly transfixed by Rhys’ prose, which Francis Wyndham describes in his introduction as ‘that mixture of quivering immediacy and glassy objectivity’, and the psychological acuity with which Rhys treats empire, race and hysteria, as well as the power relations between men and women. I was nineteen or twenty then, studying post-colonialism at university and under the spell of more florid, overtly allegorical and political writers like Marquez and Rushdie and their popular brands of magic realism. Perhaps this last lesson was one I needed even though – or because – my own career had started with such promise. It was a love affair that changed my idea of what fiction could do, what it might be for, and about the faith one must keep with one’s art even under the most adverse circumstances.

I first fell in love with Jean Rhys’ writing through reading Wide Sargasso Sea. Cover detail from the first edition dust jacket for Wide Sargasso Sea.

Wide sargasso sea book