Sarah Grand

   Sarah Grand is not that much familiar writer, we can someway call her an unknown author. Her education was very sporadic, yet she managed with perseverance to make a career for herself as an activist and writer. She used her experience of suffocation in marriage and the joy of consequent liberation in her fictional depictions of pre- suffrage women with few political rights and options, trapped in oppressive marriages.

    She was expelled from her school because of organizing groups that supported Josephine Butler's protest against the Contagious Disease Act, which persecuted prostitutes as infected women, as the sole cause of the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, subjecting them to indignities such as inspection of their genitals and enclosure in locked hospital wards.

     Her later works would have a more sympathetic stance to males, such as "Babs the Impossible" in which the single woman would feel resurgence in their worth encouraged by an idealistic self made man.

Antoinette in 'Wide Sargasso Sea'

 The character of Antoinette in 'Wide Sargasso Sea' by Jean Rhys is a modified form of Bertha Mason in 'Jane Eyre' by Charlotte Bronte. Antoinette's story is certainly sad. But it is also complicated and puzzling.She said in the novel that the 'Nature is better than people' which indicates her brutal honesty with Rochester. She knows that her husband views her as inferior because she is a white Creole woman. Racism is ugly and she is going to call him out on it.

We definitely feel sorry about all the stuff that happened to her. She has got a vivid dream llife, so vivid in fact that it seeps into the reality she lives in. She is absolutely candid about the effect that everything that's happened in her life has had on her. She lost her entire family, watching her mother get molested by her caretaker, listening to Rochester have sex with Amelie in the next room and after all getting locked up in an attic in a foreign country.

Antoinette is constantly questioning who she is, but, by the end of the novel, she really seems to forget who she is. Antoinette is a woman representative of suppression by the patriarchal society.

Bertha Mason in 'Jane Eyre'

'Jane Eyre' (1847), the novel of Charlotte Bronte, is one of the most iconic love stories of all time. It is mainly about the love between Mr.Rochester and Jane Eyre. But, there is another character who has been considered as the ' mad woman in the attic'- Bertha Mason; the first wife of Mr.Rochester.

Bertha is the great tragedy of Rochester's life. She is the catalyst that proves Rochester's ultimate redemption and Jane's moral virtue. Bertha has considered as the image of terror, sickness and malice. The story is picturising Bertha Mason as an image of horror and as a tragic figure. She is considered as one of the most controversial characters of all time.

In Victorian era, mental illness was taken as a token of a familial taint, a sort of curse on the bloodline. Bertha Mason's madness is a sign of an inward corruption, a cancer that has eaten through her body, mind, spirit and bloodline.

The complete figure of Bertha as a tragedy has changed in Jean Rhys' "Wide Sargasso Sea". Bertha Mason in the twentieth century has earned her own redemption of sorts, particularly following in this novel. It is widely considered the first postcolonial novel. The novel presents a far more sympathetic and infinitely more human image of Rochester's wife, who was, according to the novel, born Antoinette Cosway on the island of Jamaica. Through this novel, the character of Bertha Mason as a tragedy got salvation.