Best Selling Books by Jean Rhys

The story of the first Mrs Rochester, the mad wife in Charlotte Brontë''s Jane Eyre.

A woman encounters a life filled with desires and emotions when she returns to Paris after suffering from a bout of depression and alcoholism in London.

Verhalen uit het Caraibisch gebied.

Living in Paris with her reckless, vagabond husband Stephan, Marya is very near to being happy. She enjoys their haphazard existence, never questioning how he lives, never wanting to know the truth. When Stephan is suddenly imprisoned she is left penniless and alone. Taken up by a sophisticated English couple, the Heidlers, who gradually overwhelm her with their own desires, Marya finds her sense of reality slipping further and further away. Set against a background of winter-wet streets and smoke-filled cafés, Jean Rhys''s first novel is both poignant and disturbingly intimate in its vivid depiction of a woman on her own.

One of the BBC''s ''100 Novels That Shaped Our World'' ''Rhys took one of the works of genius of the 19th Century and turned it inside-out to create one of the works of genius of the 20th Century'' Michele Roberts Jean Rhys''s masterpiece tells the story of Jane Eyre''s ''madwoman in the attic'', Bertha Rochester. Born into the oppressive, colonialist society of 1930s Jamaica, white Creole heiress Antoinette Cosway meets a young Englishman who is drawn to her innocent beauty and sensuality. After their marriage, however, disturbing rumours begin to circulate which poison her husband against her. Caught between his demands and her own precarious sense of belonging, Antoinette is inexorably driven towards madness, and her husband into the arms of another novel''s heroine. This classic study of betrayal, a seminal work of postcolonial literature, is Jean Rhys''s brief, beautiful masterpiece. Edited with an introduction and notes by Angela Smith

''It was as if a curtain had fallen, hiding everything I had ever known, '' says Anna Morgan, eighteen years old and catapulted to England from the West Indies after the death of her beloved father. Working as a chorus girl, Anna drifts into the demi-monde of Edwardian London

Jean Rhys''s late, literary masterpiece Wide Sargasso Sea was inspired by Charlotte Brontë''s Jane Eyre, and is set in the lush, beguiling landscape of Jamaica in the 1830s. Born into an oppressive, colonialist society, Creole heiress Antoinette Cosway meets a young Englishman who is drawn to her innocent sensuality and beauty. After their marriage the rumours begin, poisoning her husband against her. Caught between his demands and her own precarious sense of belonging, Antoinette is driven towards madness.

Julia Martin is in Paris and at the end of her rope. Once beautiful, she was taken care of by men. Now after being dropped by her latest lover, she visits London to see her ailing mother and meets up with her distrustful sister, Norah. This is a haunting picture of two desperate women in a desperate predicament.

Jean Rhys''s Good Morning Midnight is an unforgettable portrait of a woman bravely confronting loneliness and despair in her quest for self-determination In 1930s Paris, where one cheap hotel room is very like another, a young woman is teaching herself indifference. She has escaped personal tragedy and has come to France to find courage and seek independence. She tells herself to expect nothing, especially not kindness, least of all from men. Tomorrow, she resolves, she will dye her hair blonde. Jean Rhys was a talent before her time with an impressive ability to express the anguish of young women. In Good Morning, Midnight Rhys created the powerfully modern portrait of Sophia Jansen, whose emancipation is far more painful and complicated than she could expect, but whose confession is flecked with triumph and elation. With an introduction by A.L. Kennedy ''Her eloquence in the language of human sexual transactions is chilling, cynical, and surprisingly moving'' A.L. Kennedy

New to Penguin Classics, the remarkable, devastating collected stories by the author of Wide Sargasso Sea. Some of Jean Rhys''s most powerful writing is to be found in this rich, dark collection of her collected stories. Her fictional world is haunted by her own, painful memories: of cheap hotels and drab Parisian cafés; of devastating love affairs; of her childhood in Dominica; of drifting through European cities, always on the periphery and always perilously close to the abyss. Rendered in extraordinarily vivid, honest prose, these stories show Rhys at the height of her literary powers and offer a fascinating counterpoint to her most famous novel, Wide Sargasso Sea. This volume includes all the stories from her three collections,The Left Bank (1927), Tigers Are Better-Looking (1968) and Sleep It Off, Lady (1976).

Julia Martin is at the end of her rope in Paris. Once beautiful, she was taken care of by men. Now after leaving her lover, she is running out of luck. A visit to London to see her ailing mother and distrustful sister bring her stark life into full focus.

''A wonderful bitter-sweet book, written with disarming simplicity'' Esther Freud ''It was as if a curtain had fallen, hiding everything I had ever known,'' says Anna Morgan, eighteen years old and catapulted to England from the West Indies after the death of her beloved father. Working as a chorus girl, Anna drifts into the demi-monde of Edwardian London. But there, dismayed by the unfamiliar cold and greyness, she is absolutely alone and unconsciously floating from innocence to harsh experience. Her childish dreams have been replaced by harsh reality. Voyage in the Dark was first published in 1934, but it could have been written today. It is the story of an unhappy love affair, a portrait of a hypocritical society, and an exploration of exile and breakdown; all written in Jean Rhys''s hauntingly simple and beautiful style.

So there''s a good time coming for the ladies, is there?-a good time coming for the girls? About time too'' Stories of women adrift in seedy bars and down-at-heel hotels, from a master of the short story form.