In Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Jean Rhys's bravura prequel to Jane Eyre, Edward Fairfax Rochester's self-pitying tale of his catastrophic marriage to a crazed colonial heiress is rewritten from the point of view of Bertha Mason, his white Jamaican wife. Jane Eyre is the inspiration and point of departure for Rhys's late, great novel, but Wide Sargasso Sea, set in Rhys's native Caribbean in the first half of the nineteenth century, imitates neither the style nor the narrative structures of its 1847 original. A vanguard piece of Victoriana, spawning imitations of its own, it is strictly modernist in form, echoing – and further extending – the elliptical mode of storytelling that characterised Rhys's brilliant quartet of novels published between the world wars: pitiless, quasi-autobiographical accounts of the predicament of modern women at once liberated and lost in post-Victorian Britain and France. As well as expanding Jane Eyre's backstory, Wide Sargasso Sea also sketches in an imaginary prehistory for Rhys's twentieth-century fictions about sexually adventurous but loving women from Britain's colonies, at risk from predatory metropolitan men. Written two decades before postcolonial scholars had turned their attention to the politics of race and empire in Brontë's canonical novel, Wide Sargasso Sea provocatively introduced those questions about sexuality and empire which have become a central theme in the rewriting and reinterpretation of the Victorian.

Banishing the Victorian happy ending is one effective narrative strategy for dispersing the long shadow that the imperial imagination cast on colonisers and colonised.