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" I was in college when my favorite writing teacher told me to read the Wide Sargasso Sea, a kind of prequel to Jane Eyre by Jean Rhys. As an English major, you are drowned in recommendations, but what she said next made me run out and buy it: &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;ll never be the same again.&amp;quot; Those are glory words to an eighteen-year-old, and I devoured the book just as she guessed I would. How did she know? I was a tomboy in my literary tastes. Jane Austen novels bored me. Charlotte Bronte&amp;#039;s Jane Eyre was more to my taste, but there was still something a little irritating about Ms. Eyre. The Wide Sargasso Sea&amp;#039;s Antoinette Cosway\u2014who would become the madwoman in the attic from Jane Eyre\u2014shattered me. I lived that book. The prose is crystalline and sensual, but it&amp;#039;s the knowingness of how things really are, the lack of sugarcoating it, that devastates you: &amp;quot;They say when trouble comes, close ranks, and so the white people did. But we were not in their ranks.&amp;quot; It made me permanently on the side of the underdog, looking for the part of the story people are trying to hide\u2014not a bad place for a fiction writer to be.  Tatjana Soli&amp;#039;s debut novel The Lotus Eaters is available now.    Photo: Jason Wallis "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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