4 Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

This is the backstory to the ultimate dysfunctional landed country marriage, the Rochester-Mason union in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. You’ll remember that while wooing Jane, Edward Rochester was, inconveniently, already married to a Creole heiress called Bertha Mason. And that she was mad. And locked up in the attic of his grand pile, Thornfield Hall. Rochester insisted that Bertha’s insanity was hereditary, but Rhys devastatingly suggests the ways in which his emotional abuse of his vulnerable young wife contributes to her deteriorating mental state.

Jane Eyre

Based on the beloved Charlotte Brontë novel of the same name, the 2011 romantic drama Jane Eyre stars Mia Wasikowska as the eponymous character, who becomes the governess at the estate of Edward Rochester (Michael Fassbender), developing a close friendship with her often dark and moody employer. When Jane discovers a terrible secret lurking within the walls of Thornfield Hall, she finds her newfound happiness threatened and begins to not only question her feelings for Edward but her safety as well. (Rachel Johnson)

The synopsis suggests a type of governess much more sophisticated than those we’ve seen in something like The Sound of Music or Jane Eyre. (Josh Philips)

Great books are relevant to all ages, epochs and readers, but it is philistinic to uncouple them from their historical and social context. Just because Austen was a woman doesn’t mean that her texts will tell Spanish students anything about the state of diversity in their country, just as Ralph Ellison’s investigation of race in Invisible Man (1952) can’t be understood as separable from the political ideologies flying around Harlem in the 1950s. 

A 2018 teaching toolkit, produced by the Decolonising SOAS Working Group no less, claimed that part of the problem was how academics lean on “concepts, ideas and perspectives that centre or normalise constructions of “Westernness” or “whiteness” as basic reference points for human society”. Such an idea suggests that all “Western” writers are the same, and all “white” authors come from the same reference points. It is the McDonaldisation of culture writ large: everything is the same. This view tends to fall apart once you ask students to read Jane Eyre alongside Jean Rhys. 

A good university education is flexible: academics can use their curricula to reflect what will excite contemporary students, but also to keep an eye on that old Matthew Arnold quote about the importance of top-quality texts. There’s no need to get Little Englander about changes such as Austen-for-Morrison: great literature will always transcend both pages and geographical borders. (Ella Whelan)

And in those hours, I nosed around the new books that had found their way into her already bursting shelves: Woman At Point Zero, Wide Sargasso Sea, A Wicked Old Woman, Feminist Fables. No one at school had heard of these books—where had they come from, why was no one else reading them? Why do you read such strange books? When I was up late because I wasn’t writing the essay on Jane Eyre I was supposed to write, proclaiming the book was boring, she told me to write about Jane’s dreams. These are nonsense, I said, like all dreams are, and so she interpreted them for me, the images somehow speaking to her just as easily as the Urdu script, bringing new life to my sense of Jane, of the meanings dreams can hold. Then she explained how I could catch my own dreams (in case I ever needed to). Maybe, I said, you should consider baking more. (Aamina Ahmad)