MOVED from MAIN - "sequels" to the classics

[Carol]

--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at yahoogroups.com, "Lynn - horsenstuff at ..."
<horsenstuff at ...> wrote:
>
> --- Carol <justcarol67 at ...> wrote:
> > <snip>
> > BTW, someone mentioned "The Madwoman in the Attic,"
> > which does refer to the mad wife of Mr. Rochester 
> > in "Jane Eyre" but is actually a book of feminist 
> > literary criticism, not a novel. The full title is
> > "Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the
> > Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination," and it 
> > was published in 1979. The authors, Sandra Gilbert 
> > and Susan Gubar, are well-known feminist critics 
> > who examine novels by Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, 
> > the Brontë sisters, and others for repressed 
> > sexuality or some such thing. <snip>
> 
> 
> I was not referring to a book entitled "Mad Woman in
> the Attic."  Simply using the phrase to refer to
> Rochester's first wife in Jane Eyre.
> 
> The name of the book with the "Mad Wife" I was
> referring to is "Wide Sargasso Sea" by Jean Rhys
> (sp?).
> 
> Lynn
>
Carol responds:
My apologies for the misunderstanding. I haven't read "Wide Sargasso
Sea," but evidently, Jean Rhys, herself a Creole, identified with
Rochester's Creole wife and was, as you say, inspired directly by
"Jane Eyre." It would be interesting to know whether she also read
"The Madwoman in the Attic" and what she thought of it.

Is the novel worth reading? I need something to interest me other than
Harry Potter, and, so far, even old favorites like the Austen novels
are failing to do the trick.

Carol, who thinks that "The Wide Sargasso Sea" is a beautiful title