In Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys not only famously shifts the
focus of the narative from Brontë’s Jane Eyre to Bertha
Rochester (who here first appears as Antoinette, but she also
sets the novel decades later than Brontë did hers. Drawing upon
Mark McWatt's "The Preoccupation with the Past in West Indian
Literature," Veronica Marie Gregg points to the novel's abundant
evidence of this “crucial” change of chronological setting:
Marmion, newly published when Jane is given a copy toward the
end of the novel, appeared in 1808, whereas the date for the
Emancipation Act is 1833. Bertha Mason was already confined to
the attic of Thornfield Hall by the first decade of the
nineteenth century, whereas Antoinette Cosway in Wide Sargasso
Sea was still a child in the 1840s. In terms of Jane Eyre the
literary references in Wide Sargasso Sea are equally
anachronistic: "Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair" was written
by Stephen Foster in 1826; Tennyson's "Miller's Daughter" was
not well known until the 1840s; most of Byron's p