I've had Wide Sargasso Sea on my shelves for years. I picked it up at some point before I knew anything about it, maybe because of its inclusion on the (deeply flawed) Modern Library list of 100 best novels? I don't really recall. I do remember pulling it out several years ago as something to possibly read, then seeing its connection to Jane Eyre in the blurb and thinking I should probably wait to read it until after I'd read Jane Eyre, so I would have the proper context. (If by chance you don't know, Wide Sargasso Sea creates a back story for the mad Creole woman in the attic in Jane Eyre.) In 2011, when I decided to catch up on all the 19th Century English literature I had somehow missed, I finally did read Jane Eyre. I didn't particularly like it, which made me not particularly inclined to read Wide Sargasso Sea (though I do recognize the flaw in that logic). Anyway, my world books reading project gave me a reason to finally read it (Dominica: check!) and I'm glad I did. The prose in Wide Sargasso Sea was lovely. The tropics sounded wild and beautiful and lush and a bit scary. It made me want to go back to Guadeloupe.
A book like this presents a sort of conundrum: it's hard to evaluate it on its own; should one even attempt to do so? When reading it, I found I sort of wished I didn't know the Jane Eyre connection. Of course, if I hadn't known it, the significance of certain descriptions and events in the book would have been lost on me. How would the end have felt different if I didn't know the result of the fire she starts?
A quick update on what I'm calling my world books project: I'm up to 44 countries read (out of my count of 212, so about 20%). So far this year, I've read books from 18 different countries, though not all of these were first books from those countries. I feel like this is "not bad" -- or maybe even "pretty good" -- on both fronts.
