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Jean Rhys was born in Dominica in 1894. After arriving in England aged sixteen, she became a chorus girl and drifted between different jobs before moving to Paris, where she started to write in the late 1920s. She published a story collection and four novels, after which she disappeared from view and lived reclusively for many years. In 1966 she made a sensational comeback with her masterpiece, Wide Sargasso Sea, written in difficult circumstances over a long period. Rhys died in 1979.
Rhys was haunted by the figure of the first Mrs Rochester, the mad wife in the attic in Bronte's Jane Eyre. Antoinette Cosway is a Creole heiress, whose family traps the young Rochester into marrying her. Soon after the marriage, the rumours of insanity and inbreeding in her family turn him against her. Alone in the house on the Yorkshire moors, she succumbs to madness and is imprisoned in the attic, while downstairs, Jane Eyre is trying to steal her husband. (Kirkus UK)
