☰Wide Sargasso Sea

Jean Rhys grew up in Roseau and never stopped writing about Dominica, even after decades in England. Wide Sargasso Sea reimagines the backstory of the "madwoman in the attic" from Jane Eyre — Antoinette Cosway, a white Creole woman caught between the Caribbean world she loves and the English husband who cannot understand it. The novel's lush, uneasy Dominica, with its rainforest, its heat, and its simmering racial tensions, is recognisably the real island. Reading it before you visit changes how you see the old stone buildings of Roseau and the green mountains above them.