Five top books inspired by classic novels

Sophie Ratcliffe is professor of literature and creative criticism at the University of Oxford and a fellow and tutor at Lady Margaret Hall. In addition to her scholarly books, including On Sympathy, she has published commentary pieces and book reviews for the Guardian, the New Statesman, and the Times Literary Supplement, among other outlets, and has served a judge for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction and the Wellcome Book Prize.

Ratcliffe's forthcoming book is Loss, A Love Story: Imagined Histories and Brief Encounters.

At the Guardian she tagged five of the best books inspired by classic novels, including:

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

A passionate, feminist prequel to Jane Eyre, Rhys’s final novel gives a voice to the madwoman in the attic. Before she became Bertha Mason, Rochester’s first wife was we learn, the beautiful, troubled Antoinette Cosway. Dramatic and painterly, Rhys’s narrative captures the beauties of the landscape of Jamaica, Cosway’s childhood home, as well as the ugliness of historical guilt and complicity. Groundbreaking on its publication in 1966, Wide Sargasso Sea has lost none of its charge.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Wide Sargasso Sea is among Jane Corry's ten heroines who kept their motives hidden, Siân Phillips's six favorite books, Richard Gwyn's top ten books in which things end badly, and Elise Valmorbida's top ten books on the migrant experience.

--Marshal Zeringue