《简·爱》问世将近一个半世纪以来，世界各国到底有多少痴心的女读者在这个相貌平平、过早饱尝人生辛酸、但终末失去与生活搏斗勇气的简·爱身上找寻自己的影子，寄予同情，其人数当然无法统计，但肯定是大有人在。然而，若要问有多少女读者对简·爱追求幸福的苦难历程上的障碍——幽禁在顶楼上的疯女人感到一丝一毫同情，甚或对她产生一点儿好感的，那倒大概可以说为数不多吧。但就在为数不多的人中，却有一位对疯女人产生了浓烈的兴趣，她就是英国当代女作家简·里斯(Jean Rhys，1894—1979)。凭她对《简·爱》一书的深刻研究，对疯女人出生时代背景和社会环境——十九世纪英国在西半球的殖民地——的充分了解，再加自己对这一人物的理解和同情，经过多次修订再全部推翻重写的痛苦创作过程，终于完成定稿，并于1966年出版，书名《藻海无边》(Wide Sargasso Sea)，而且于同年获得英国皇家文学会奖，1967年又获W．H．史密斯奖，还被接纳为英国皇家文学会会员。

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In 1966 Jean Rhys reemerged after a long silence with a novel called Wide Sargasso Sea. Rhys had enjoyed minor literary success in the 1920s and '30s with a series of evocative novels featuring women protagonists adrift in Europe, verging on poverty, hoping to be saved by men. By the '40s, however, her work was out of fashion, too sad for a world at war. And Rhys herself was often too sad for the world--she was suicidal, alcoholic, troubled by a vast loneliness. She was also a great writer, despite her powerful self-destructive impulses.

Wide Sargasso Sea is the story of Antoinette Cosway, a Creole heiress who grew up in the West Indies on a decaying plantation. When she comes of age she is married off to an Englishman, and he takes her away from the only place she has known--a house with a garden where "the paths were overgrown and a smell of dead flowers mixed with the fresh living smell. Underneath the tree ferns, tall as forest tree ferns, the light was green. Orchids flourished out of reach or for some reason not to be touched."

The novel is Rhys's answer to Jane Eyre. Charlotte Brontë's book had long haunted her, mostly for the story it did not tell--that of the madwoman in the attic, Rochester's terrible secret. Antoinette is Rhys's imagining of that locked-up woman, who in the end burns up the house and herself. Wide Sargasso Sea follows her voyage into the dark, both from her point of view and Rochester's. It is a voyage charged with soul-destroying lust. "I watched her die many times," observes the new husband. "In my way, not in hers. In sunlight, in shadow, by moonlight, by candlelight. In the long afternoons when the house was empty."

Rhys struggled over the book, enduring rejections and revisions, wrestling to bring this ruined woman out of the ashes. The slim volume was finally published when she was 70 years old. The critical adulation that followed, she said, "has come too late." Jean Rhys died a few years later, but with Wide Sargasso Sea she left behind a great legacy, a work of strange, scary loveliness. There has not been a book like it before or since. Believe me, I've been searching. --Emily White