Discussed in this essay:
A View of the Empire at Sunset, by Caryl Phillips. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
336 pages. $26.

Few writers have written as seductively about the free fall from self-control as Jean Rhys. She is best known for her novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), a reimagining of the backstory to Edward Rochester’s disastrous youthful marriage in Jane Eyre (1847). In Rhys’s version, the first Mrs. Rochester is neither depraved nor even necessarily destined to go mad. She is the Jamaican Creole heiress Antoinette Cosway Mason, emotionally unguarded and lethally innocent in her passion for the chilly…