Quote by Jean Rhys: “There is always the other side. Always.”

Every story that gets told has a version that goes untold — usually the version belonging to those with less power. Rhys wrote this truth into fiction by giving voice to the 'mad' Creole woman in Jane Eyre, insisting her perspective was just as real and valid.

Wide Sargasso Sea was published in 1966, when postcolonial literature was beginning to challenge the canon of Western fiction. Rhys herself had long felt like an outsider — born in Dominica, never fully accepted in Britain — and the novel's insistence on the unseen perspective grew from her own experience of erasure.

Dominican-born British novelist whose 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea reimagined Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre from the perspective of the Creole first wife, Bertha Mason. Her work is considered a landmark of postcolonial and feminist literature.