Wide Sargasso Sea: A Norton Critical Edition Paperback – Illustrated, November 17, 1998

This edition of the novel has comprehensive autobiographical information that is crucial to one's understanding and appreciation of the novel. It has also a variety of critical writings on the novel by different scholars. An excellent choice for students who are studying this novel at the upper Secondary School or University level.

this edition of this book gives extra incite and defines certain words that are not in the average vernacular. It also gives incite into cultural aspects of the book and background about the story.

One of the best works of colonial and feminist lit. I've read in a long time. I've never been a huge fan of Jane Eyre and this book beautifully emphasizes some of the horrid flaws apparent in Bronte's work. I do think you need to have a basic understanding of Jane Eyre in order to fully appreciate this novel. I found Rhys's writing to be tragic, yet liberating, and the ending, veering into Jane Eyre's plot, suggests the inevitability go the whole thing: Rhys isn't arguing for a re-writing of the novel, because it cannot be re-written. She is simply giving a voice to one of the most ignored character tropes in Western/Victorian literature, the mad woman in the attic, and thus, liberating her from the confines of the page. Through this, she also toppled the conventional notion of the Bildungsroman right on its head, a beautiful inversion that is also heartbreakingly tragic.

I found the Norton Critical Edition absolutely necessary to understand what was going on in the story as it takes place in the early 18th century in a culture I'm not at all familiar with. It is almost a print version of what's accessible on a Kindle.

Arrived on time and in condition as stated.

I love this book! I read it as an assignment at a community college and now I'm reading it for fun! There's not too many books in my life to where I can do both!

Sadly, "Wide Sargasso Sea" wasn't what I was hoping it would be. Although the Norton edition is very comprehensive, the novella itself was disappointing to me. It feels like a slightly forced attempt to present Bertha as an innocent, naive victim of her creeping madness, which ends up rendering her as a pretty one-dimensional being. As I'm sure the author intended, it's far more of a response (a disagreeing one at that) than a supplement to "Jane Eyre," offering an alternative view of the events described by Rochester, rather than a more literature-based exploration of couple's courtship and marriage. I'd have much rather read something that showed Bertha as a fully dimensional character capable of committing conscious sins (such as willfully cheating on her husband) while suffering the effects of her hereditary mental illness, than this view of her as an addled young woman helplessly destroyed by madness.I appreciate it as an attempt to re-write this part of the Jane Eyre story, but I don't think it really hits the mark. In my reading, it merely moves Bertha from one side of the stock character spectrum to the other.

I recommend this book, now more than ever, in the middle of a moment in time and culture where the questioning of postcolonialism is at rising, this book and the essays that accompany the edition are relevant.