《簡·愛》問世將近一個半世紀以來，世界各國到底有多少癡心的女讀者在這個相貌平平、過早飽嘗人生辛酸、但終末失去與生活搏鬥勇氣的簡·愛身上找尋自己的影子，寄予同情，其人數當然無法統計，但肯定是大有人在。然而，若要問有多少女讀者對簡·愛追求幸福的苦難曆程上的障礙——幽禁在頂樓上的瘋女人感到一絲一毫同情，甚或對她産生一點兒好感的，那倒大概可以說為數不多吧。但就在為數不多的人中，卻有一位對瘋女人産生瞭濃烈的興趣，她就是英國當代女作傢簡·裏斯(Jean Rhys，1894—1979)。憑她對《簡·愛》一書的深刻研究，對瘋女人齣生時代背景和社會環境——十九世紀英國在西半球的殖民地——的充分瞭解，再加自己對這一人物的理解和同情，經過多次修訂再全部推翻重寫的痛苦創作過程，終於完成定稿，並於1966年齣版，書名《藻海無邊》(Wide Sargasso Sea)，而且於同年獲得英國皇傢文學會奬，1967年又獲W．H．史密斯奬，還被接納為英國皇傢文學會會員。

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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