Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
Part I
Antoinette Cosway is a young girl living with her mother and brother at Coulibri, near a Spanish Town, Jamaica. The Emancipation Act was going on and the death of her father, the family is financially ruined. The black community despises them for being former slaveholders, and the white community looks down on them because they are poor, Creole, and, in her mother’s case, French. Motivated in part by her family’s desperate situation, Antoinette’s mother, marries Mr. Mason, a rich planter. This marriage, however, only seems to bother the racial tensions in their neighborhood. One night, the house burns down. The entire family escapes, all except Antoinette’s brother who dies due to his exposure to the smoke. Pierre’s death devastates Annette, who goes mad with grief. Mr. Mason sends Annette off to an isolated house to be cared for by a couple of color. Antoinette is sent to live with her aunt Cora in Spanish Town.
Part II
Part II opens with a newly wedded Antoinette and Rochester on their honeymoon in Granbois. After a month of dating they married. But the honeymoon is short, and Rochester receives a letter from a man who claims to be Daniel, Antoinette’s stepbrother. The letter alleges that there is a history of Antoinette’s family, and it also alleges that Antoinette had previously been engaged to a relative of color. After receiving the letter, Rochester treats her terribly. Antoinette then drugs and seduces Rochester. Rochester wakes up and realizes that he has been drugged, and sleeps with Antoinette’s maid in revenge.
Part III
Part III opens with Antoinette already confined in Thornfield Hall. Antoinette seems to have little sense of where she is. Her stepbrother visits her. Finally, she dreams that she escapes from her room and sets fire to the entire house.
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Jane Eyre is a story of a young, orphaned girl named Jane Eyre who lives with her aunt and cousins, the Reeds, at Gateshead Hall. Mrs. Reed hates Jane and allows her son John to torture the poor girl. Even the servants remind Jane that she’s worthless. Jane has had enough and finally opens up against this treatment and tells them all exactly what she thinks of them. She’s punished by being locked in “the red room,” the bedroom where her uncle died. After this, nobody knows what to do with her, so they send her away to a religious boarding school for orphans.
At Lowood, which is ran by Mr. Brocklehurst, the students never have enough to eat or warm clothes. However, Jane finds a friend, Helen Burns, and a nice teacher, Miss Temple. She becomes an excellent student. She learns French, piano-playing, singing, and drawing. During the house party, a man named Richard Mason shows up, and Rochester seems afraid. At night, Mason gets bitten. Before Jane can discover more about the situation, she gets a message that her Aunt Reed is very sick and is asking for her. Jane forgave her for mistreating her when she was a child and she goes back to take care of her dying aunt.
It’s the day of Jane and Rochester’s wedding. It should be the happiest day of Jane’s life, but during the church ceremony two men show up claiming that Rochester is already married. Mrs. Rochester is Bertha Mason, the “madwoman in the attic” who tried to burn Rochester to death in his bed, stabbed and bit her own brother (Richard Mason), and who’s been doing other creepy things at night. But Rochester fell in love with Jane. Jane offers to go to India with him. St. John won’t give up and keeps pressuring Jane to marry him. She finds out that Mr. Rochester looked for her everywhere and, when he couldn’t find her, sent everyone else away from the house and shut himself up alone. Now Rochester has lost an eye and a hand and is blind in the remaining eye. Jane goes to Mr. Rochester and offers to take care of him as his nurse or housekeeper. What she really hopes is that he’ll ask her to marry him—and he does. They have a quiet wedding, and after two years of marriage Rochester gradually gets his sight back.