Wide Sargasso Sea

Rhys writes the Caribbean back into Jane Eyre, giving the first wife her own island childhood. The anchor is Jamaica, where the creole heiress Antoinette grows up at the ruined Coulibri estate near Spanish Town after emancipation; the story then crosses to a honeymoon house on Dominica, Rhys's own birthplace, and ends far away in an English attic. It brings Jamaica, and the wider West Indies, into the atlas.

Antoinette Cosway

Coulibri Estate, near Spanish Town

Jamaica

Coulibri is the ruined sugar estate where Antoinette grows up after the abolition of slavery, in a family the freed community despises and the English newcomers scorn. The burning of the house by an angry crowd, and the death of her brother, is the wound the whole novel radiates from. It fixes her, from the start, as someone who belongs nowhere.

Part One

inspired by Coulibri is a fictional estate, but the novel places Antoinette's childhood in Jamaica near the old capital, Spanish Town, and it draws on the decayed post-emancipation plantations Rhys knew. The pin is a representative point in the countryside near Spanish Town, not a documented house.

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Antoinette Cosway

The convent, Spanish Town

Jamaica

After Coulibri, Antoinette is sent to a convent school in Spanish Town, the old Jamaican capital, the one place in the book that offers her a brief, guarded safety. The town is real and was the island's seat of government for centuries. It is the last shelter before marriage carries her out of Jamaica altogether.

Part One

explicit Named in the book.

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