Wide Sargasso Sea

Picked this up for Read Harder when it was suggested for the category “a book of colonial or post-colonial literature,” because I just read Jane Eyre for the first time and it's a prequel of sorts to Jane Eyre from the perspective of the crazy wife in the attic.

It was interesting in that it was kind of both colonial and post-colonial at the same time: Antoinette's family is white Creole, living on an island near Jamaica, and clearly had previously been slaveholders (or the children/grandchildren of slaveholders); slavery was outlawed on the island and the family had since been treated as outcasts, but then the Masons and Rochester (who is never named in the book) are Englishmen coming to the West Indies to marry the women and make what riches they can from their wives/the island.

The scenery was described beautifully and vividly, and the relationship painted as if it could have been something good, that was turned sour by cultural differences that he wasn't willing to try to understand. He allowed the gossip of the islanders to determine not only his own fate, but his wife's, of whose life afterwards is depicted only briefly, and we know the rest. A sad, good book.