Wide Sargasso Sea Lesson Plan

Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams, the woman who would become known throughout the literary world as Jean Rhys, was born on August 24, 1890, in Roseau, Dominica, one of the former English colonies in the Caribbean. Like the heroine of her most famous work, Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys was of Creole heritage; her father was British while her mother was a native white West Indian. In fact, Rhys had a great deal in common with the character of Antoinette Cosway, and her personal experiences may have shaped the events depicted in her fiction. Perhaps most notably, Rhys's great-grandfather was a slave owner who acquired a Dominican sugar plantation in the nineteenth century, but after the Emancipation...