I read
Jane Eyre and
Wide Sargasso Sea back to back for a seminar called "Novels and Re-Writing". I do prefer that novel to
Jane Eyre. To me it worked both as a standalone and as a response to
Jane Eyre, though not so much as a "prequal". It's less fanfiction than criticism, I think. When reading
Jane Eyre, Jane started out with a bonus - I liked her as a child. But as the novel continued I came to like her less and less. At the line, "Reader, I married him!" I thought, "Good for you. You deserve each other."
I thought the mad wife in the attic was horribly misrepresented and I blamed Jane's PoV for that. It's as if the mad wife had been brutally consequent in her independence and payed the price; what Jane could - child of Victorian England - could not have done. Not really. Bertha's Rochester's black spot, and Jane's bizzarro universe twin. She
had to be ignored in that book.
I think part of why I like
Sea so much (apart from the language) is that Rhys filled the blanks for me in a satisfying way. Also, we know how the character ends up, so this gives the whole a book a sense of tragedy. Antoinette is pretty uncompromising in her passion and moves to a country that lacks even the imagination to see her as anything other than... Bertha. There's really only one slot she could fill; if it hadn't been the attic it would have been the asylum.
Rochester and Antoinette broke each other, basically. The characters we meet in
Jane Eyre are very different. Rochester can fall in love again, though, because he's a man, and because he's got the advantage of familiar ground.
It's not a prequel, though. It turns
Jane Eyre's sympathy structures upside down in exactly the way I liked it. It did help me figure out why I started to dislike Jane more and more over the course of the novel, although I started out liking her a lot as a child. As I said, it works better if you read it as a response than as a prequel.
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Random fact: I remembered the title as "Wild Sargasso Sea". Hah! Talk about bias.
(It probably helps that Jean Rhys's background is very similar to Bertha's.
)