Bertha Antoinetta Rochester (née Mason) is a character in Charlotte Brontë's 1847 novel Jane Eyre. She is described as the violently insane first wife of Edward Rochester, who moved her to Thornfield Hall and locked her in a room on the third floor.
Bertha Antoinetta Rochester (née Mason) is a character in Charlotte Brontë's 1847 novel Jane Eyre. She is described as the violently insane first wife of Edward Rochester, who moved her to Thornfield Hall and locked her in a room on the third floor.
Wide Sargasso Sea is a 1966 postmodern novel by Dominican-British author Jean Rhys. Set in Jamaica in the 1830s–1840s, the novel is a postcolonial and feminist prequel to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847), detailing the background to Edward Rochester's marriage from the point of view of his wife Bertha Mason, Brontë's "madwoman in the attic", reimagined by Rhys as a Creole heiress named Antoinette Cosway.
Antoinette's story is told from the time of her youth in Jamaica, to her unhappy marriage to an English gentleman, Mr. Rochester, who renames her Bertha, declares her mad, takes her to England, and isolates her from the rest of the world in his mansion. Wide Sargasso Sea explores the power of relationships between men and women and discusses the themes of race, Caribbean history, and assimilation as Antoinette is caught in a white, patriarchal society in which she fully belongs neither to Europe nor to Jamaica.
Thornfield Hall is a location in the 1847 novel Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. It is the home of the male romantic lead, Edward Fairfax Rochester, where much of the action takes place.
Brontë uses the depiction of Thornfield in a manner consistent with the gothic tone of the novel as a whole. An isolated mansion of unspecified size, the house has a number of apparently unused rooms that become important to the narrative during the Bertha Mason passages. The Hall's gloomy character also expresses and amplifies the sense of Mr. Rochester's depression and malaise before he falls in love with Jane.