Antoinette Cosway is a Creole heiress, the product of an inbred, decadent, expatriate community, a sensitive girl at once beguiled and repelled by the lush Jamaican landscape. Soon after her marriage to Rochester rumours of madness in the Cosway family poison his mind against her; Antoinette's beautiful face turns "blank hating moonstruck"... and the action narrows, as inexorably as Greek tragedy, towards the attic in Thornfiels Hall, the grim Grace Poole and the suicidal holocaust of leaping flames. After twenty-seven years' silence Jean Rhys made a sensational literary reappearance with Wide Sargasso Sea, her story of the first Mrs Rochester, the mad wife in Charlotte Brontė's Jane Eyre.