WIDE SARGASSO SEA: Part 1

I found Wide Sargasso Sea easier and more enjoyable to read compared to Jane Eyre. WSS is much easier to ‘get into’ and to establish an understanding of. I would say that there are many similarities between this and Jane Eyre. However, I do prefer the writing style of WSS; that’s because it is written by Jean Rhys in a more modern form and it gets straight to the point whereas in Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte took too much time through the amount of description and writing excessively about Jane’s feelings and emotions. I think perhaps it is that what made reading Jane Eyre a little boring. I enjoyed it at times but I couldn’t really be bothered with all the descriptive text and stuff that’s not really important. Maybe that’s because I prefer things that go straight to the point. The structure of the text is good too; the way the book is split into three sections instead of a load of paragraphs somehow makes the book more enjoyable for me. Also the sentences are more readable. With Jane Eyre they were too long, in contrast, WSS is nicer because you can follow/imagine the book in your mind instead of getting confused with descriptive sentences that are not really necessary. I am a quite open minded person, but I have the opinion that WSS is a much better read than Jane Eyre for young people of today. I think that is because the language throughout is more what we are used to…easier to understand…as compared to the complex 1800s language of Jane Eyre. I like the way in which WSS, progresses quickly and has a fast speed to it, I like this because as a reader you don’t feel lost when reading, it makes the book easy to follow and understand, also it stops reader bias…as you are not really trapped into listening to somebody else’s thoughts and feelings on such a huge descriptive level like you are with Jane Eyre. Even though there isn’t immense amounts of description there is a lot of imagery – where you can picture the scenes well for example the fire. Just enough imagery for you too imagine the scenes but not too much that bores you. I liked the section about the fire, in this section of the book Antoinette tells of the fire that occurred at Coulibri Estate and was the beginning of her mothers ‘issues’.