BERTHA MASON

                                 BERTHA  MASON

Bertha Mason is the only daughter of a very wealthy family living in Spanish Town, Jamaica. The reader learns of her past not from her perspective but only through the description of her unhappy husband,Edvard Rochester. She is described as being of Creloe heritage. According to Rochester, Bertha was famous for her beauty: she was the pride of the town and sought after by many suitors. Upon leaving college, Rochester was persuaded by his father to visit the Mason family and court Bertha. As he tells it, he first met her at a ball she attended with her father and brother Richard, where he was entranced by her loveliness. Despite never being alone with her, and supposedly having had scarcely any interaction or conversation with her, he married her for her wealth and beauty, and with fierce encouragement from his own father and the Mason family. Rochester and Bertha began their lives as husband and wife in Jamaica. In recounting the history of their relationship, Rochester claims, "I thought I loved her. . . . Her relatives encouraged me; competitors piqued me; she allured me: a marriage was achieved almost before I knew where I was. Oh, I have no respect for myself when I think of that act! . . . I never loved, I never esteemed, I did not even know her."
Rochester explains that he was not warned that violent insanity ran in the Mason family and that the past three generations succumbed to it. He assumed Bertha's mother to be dead and was never told otherwise, but she was in fact locked away in an asylum. There was also an intellectually disabled younger brother. Rochester's father knew of this but did not bother to tell his son, caring only about the vast fortune the marriage would bring him, and the Mason family clearly wanted Bertha off their hands as quickly as possible. Rochester asserts that Bertha's mental health deteriorated quickly, though it is unclear which form of mental illness she suffers from. Her insane, violent behaviour becomes frightening to behold: crawling on all fours, snarling, and behaving in a bestial manner.
Rochester returns with her to England and has her imprisoned in an attic room for ten years with Grace Poole, a hired nurse who keeps her under control while Rochester travels abroad to forget his horrible marriage. However, Grace drinks sometimes, and Bertha manages to escape, causing havoc in the house: starting a fire in Mr Rochester's bed and biting and stabbing her own visiting brother.
Rochester's marriage to Bertha eventually stands in the way of his marrying Jane Eyre, who is unaware of Bertha's existence and whom he truly loves (though he later admits to Jane that he once thought he loved Bertha). As Bertha is insane he cannot divorce her, due to her actions being uncontrollable and thus not legitimate grounds for divorce. Years of violence, insanity, and confinement in an attic destroy Bertha's looks: when Jane sees her in the middle of the night, she describes Bertha as looking "savage," even going so far as to compare her with a "vampire" when she destroys Jane's wedding veil (an action that hints that Bertha is at least sane enough to be aware that her husband is planning to enter a bigamous marriage). Despite not loving her, Rochester attempts to save his wife from an enormous fire she starts in the house when she again escapes. Bertha perishes after she throws herself off the roof, leaving her husband free to marry Jane.

SARAH GRAND

                       SARAH GRAND

Sarah Grand was born Frances Elizabeth Bellenden Clarke in Rosebank House,Donagadee County Down, Ireland of English parents. Her father was Edward John Bellenden Clarke (1813–1862) and her mother was Margaret Bell Sherwood (1813–1874). When her father died, her mother took her and her siblings back to Brindlington, England to be near her family who lived at Rysome Garth near Hoipmton in East Yorkshire.
Grand's education was very sporadic, yet she managed with perseverance to make a career for herself as an activist and writer, drawing on her travels and life experiences.
In 1868 Grand was sent to the Royal Naval School, Twickenham, but was soon expelled for organizing groups that supported Josephine Butler's protests against the Contagous Deseases 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.
Grand was then sent to a finishing school in Kensington, London. In August 1870, at the age of sixteen, she married widowed Army surgeon David Chambers McFall, who was 21 years her senior and had two sons from his previous marriage: Chambers Haldane Cooke McFall and Albert William Crawford McFall. Grand and McFall's ly child, David Archibald EdvardMcFall, was born in Sandgate,kent, on 7 October 1871. He became an actor and took the name Archie Carlaw Grand
Through her relationship to an army surgeon, Grand learned of the anatomical physiology of the nature of Sexually transmitted diseases. She used this knowledge in her later novel The Heavenly Twins, warning of the dangers of Syphilis, advocating sensitivity rather than condemnation for the young women infected with this disease.
From 1873 to 1878 the family travelled in the Far East, providing Grand with more material for her fiction. In 1879 they moved to Norwich, and in 1881 to Warrington, Lancashire where her husband retired.
Upon returning to England, she and her husband became sexually estranged by her husband's bizarre sexual appetites. Grand felt constrained by her marriage. She turned to writing, but her first novel, Ideala, self-published in 1888, enjoyed limited success and some negative reviews. Nevertheless, she trusted in her new career to support her in her decision to leave her husband in 1890 and move to London. Recently enacted laws that allowed women to retain their personal property after marriage were an encouraging factor in her decision.
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. Later works would have a more sympathetic stance to males, such as Babs the Impossible in which the single noble women would feel resurgence in their worth encouraged by an idealistic self made man.

Antoinette

                                                            ANTOINETTE

Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea  attempts  to fill  in  the blank of a fictional character's life story . Here Rhys creates a biography  for Bertha Mason, the insane wife of Edward Rochester  in Charlotte Bronte's novel Jane Eyre. Rhys's novel begins with the narrative of Antoinette Cosway  who is a child living in the over grown and impoverished  Coulibri Estate in Jamaica . She lives alone with her mother Annette, her broyher Perre,and three black servants. Later she finds refuge in the closed, isolated life of the convent.Her arranged  marriage distresses her .The marriage is a mismatch of culture and custom.She and her english husband,Mr. Rochester, fails to relate each other. Meanwhile Rochester receives a lettr from a man claiming that he is a half  brother of Antoinette.Her past deeds ,specifically her childhood ralationship with a half-caste brother, sullies her husband's view of her.He begins to doybt his wife .He questions her racial purity .Rochester believes that he has been decieved by Richard Mason ,his own father,and by Antoinette. He thinks that they hid the fact of  Antoinette's  promiscuity and her propensity for madness. He spurns the sexual advances of his affectionate wife, and begins to sleep alone. Cristophine advises her to get seprated from her cruel husband.