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In the 1830s there were five classes of people. Many never in fact left the service of their former owners but we do see the changing dynamics of power. The former slaves had no way off the island and no where to go. The economy was based on sugar plantations which were not at the time an economically viable enterprise without slave labor. She was my father's second wife, far too young for him they thought.When I asked her why so few people came to see us, she told us that the road from Spanish Town to Coulibri Estate where we lived was bad and road repairing was now a thing of the past. The creoles (as the white residents of the island were called at the time) were to be paid a fee by the British government for their slaves, about half the then market value. The Jamaican ladies had never approved of my mother, "Because she pretty like pretty self". (I do not know if the speech patterns and dialect in the book are accurate.) It is about love, passion and beauty. Never have I see the spoken words of slavery era people of African descent conveyed in a more beautiful fashion.
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It is about life on a small island and the sense of place that can produce. It is a story of how growing up in a place of wild beauty shapes people. More than this it is a story of colonialism, relationships between blacks and whites on the island, of men to women, of Europe to its cast off children, of order to chaos.
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The book is the story of the first Mrs Rochester, the one who winds up as a mad woman. The work is a kind of prequel to Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (1847). Wide Sargasso Sea is set in the late 1830s to early 1840s. I still firmly believe this but I will talk a bit more on Jean Rhys as a person because I think there are important things to be learned from the fusing of her life and work. Normally I see the life of an author as sort of an interesting side note, not as a central part of our understanding of a book.