Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)

Rhys takes the woman confined in Jane Eyre's attic and gives her a Caribbean life, a name and a marriage shaped by money and colonial power. Antoinette's story changes what the reader can accept as an adequate explanation of her supposed madness. Knowing Brontë's central marriage plot makes the encounter sharper. Choose this for a retelling that unsettles the authority of a beloved novel while remaining a concentrated, troubling work in its own right.