Read Part 3 of Wide Sargasso Sea today - the 'madwoman in the attic' segment. I think I've read it as a whole some five or six times previously, and dipped into it in the classroom many more times than that. It loses none of its hallucinatory power on a rereading; in fact, it gains in intensity.
I can't think of any other treatment of 'madness' in a novel that comes close to being so convincing and so frightening and so destabilising. The moment when we realise Antoinette's seeming account of the fire in which she will perish is not (yet) literal but the conclusion of the premonitory dream that has haunted her since childhood, and she's about to enact that vision in what seems a triumphant manner, is possibly the most stunning moment in a text that at times seems like nothing so much as an assault on the reader's sensibilities.
On the back page of the edition I'm reading it quotes someone as saying the novel is one of the works of genius of the twentieth century. That's not hyperbole by any stretch of the imagination. Indeed, stretching our imaginations to make room for the victimised and dispossessed and their pain is what Rhys is so disturbingly good at.
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