Jennifer Cody Epstein is the author of four novels that have been published in a total of twenty-one countries around the world: The Madwomen of Paris (2023), Wunderland (2019), The Gods of Heavenly Punishment (2012), and The Painter from Shanghai (2007).[The Page 69 Test: The Painter from Shanghai; The Page 69 Test: The Gods of Heavenly Punishment; Writers Read: Jennifer Cody Epstein (May 2019); The Page 69 Test: Wunderland; Q&A with Jennifer Cody Epstein; The Page 69 Test: The Madwomen of Paris; My Book, The Movie: The Madwomen of Paris]
She is the recipient of the 2014 Asia Pacific American Librarians Association Honor Award for fiction, and was longlisted for the 2020 Simpson/Joyce Carol Oates Literary Prize.
At Shepherd Epstein tagged five of her favorite books about badass madwomen. One title on the list:
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean RhysRead about the other entries on the list.
This is probably the most powerful example of literary pastiche novels I’ve read, not just because it takes on one of the most beloved novelsin English literature—Jane Eyre—but because it brutally turns that novel’s premises on their gentrified heads.
I am truly awed by how vibrantly Rhys inhabits Antoinette, Rochester’s doomed wife, weaving in themes of colonialism and gendered power into Charlotte Brontë’s Gothic romance and, in the process, making it a kind of subversive and gritty feminist and anti-colonial manifesto.
Rhys’s depiction of Antoinette’s descent into madness is so visceral and believable that you are (or at least I am) all but cheering as she literally burns the patriarchy to the ground. I also love that while it’s generally considered Rhys’s masterpiece, she wrote it in her seventies.
Wide Sargasso Sea is among Sophie Ratcliffe's five top books inspired by classic novels, 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
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