Rhys Jean - The Cambridge Introduction to Jean Rhys

Jane Austen Janet Todd

Samuel Beckett Ronan McDonald

Walter Benjamin David Ferris

J. M. Coetzee Dominic Head

Joseph Conrad John Peters

Jacques Derrida Leslie Hill

Emily Dickinson Wendy Martin

George Eliot Nancy Henry

T. S. Eliot John Xiros Cooper

William Faulkner Theresa M. Towner

F. Scott Fitzgerald Kirk Curnutt

Michel Foucault Lisa Downing

Robert Frost Robert Faggen

Nathaniel Hawthorne Leland S. Person

Zora Neale Hurston Lovalerie King

James Joyce Eric Bulson

Herman Melville Kevin J. Hayes

Sylvia Plath Jo Gill

Edgar Allen Poe Benjamin F. Fisher

Ezra Pound Ira Nadel

Jean Rhys Elaine Savory

Shakespeare Emma Smith

Shakespeares Comedies Penny Gay

Shakespeares History Plays Warren Chernaik

Shakespeares Tragedies Janette Dillon

Harriet Beecher Stowe Sarah Robbins

Mark Twain Peter Messent

Virginia Woolf Jane Goldman

W. B. Yeats David Holdeman

Edith Wharton Pamela Knights

Walt Whitman M. Jimmie Killingsworth

The American Short Story Martin Scofield

Creative Writing David Morley

Early English Theatre Janette Dillon

English Theatre, 16601900 Peter Thomson

Francophone Literature Patrick Corcoran

Modernism Pericles Lewis

Modern Irish Poetry Justin Quinn

Narrative (second edition) H. Porter Abbott

The Nineteenth-Century American Novel Gregg Crane

Postcolonial Literatures C. L. Innes

Russian Literature Caryl Emerson

The Short Story in English Adrian Hunter

Theatre Historiography Thomas Postlewait

Theatre Studies Christopher Balme

Tragedy Jennifer Wallace

Elaine Savory

The New School University, New York City

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

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This story begins with a powerful literary lion, Ford Madox Ford, loving and mentoring a beautiful, much younger, very gifted woman in the heady literary atmosphere of 1920s Paris. The connection between them did not last but the woman became the writer Jean Rhys. Her literary style was immediately highly praised but, after a collection of short stories and four novels, she sank into obscurity for almost three decades. Then her fifth and last novel catapulted her into literary stardom in her middle seventies. Her timing was perfect. This exquisitely crafted text appealed to readers interested in the exploitation of women, in race and in colonialism, all important issues in the mid-1960s, a time when West Indian immigration to Britain also brought the Caribbean more into the consciousness of the reading public.

It was gradually discovered that the life of the woman behind the writer was also a gripping story. The given name of Jean Rhys was Ella Gwendoline Rees Williams. She was from an elite family in the colonial Caribbean. She went to England to find her future, became an unsuccessful chorus girl, suffered the death of her father, and almost immediately afterwards, she got her heart broken by a rich gentleman and subsequently fell into a period of rackety living before her first marriage. She had strained relationships with most of her original family. Her first child died as a young baby, and she was separated from her second child for long periods of time. She had three husbands, two of whom went to jail for petty fraud, while the other was an unsuccessful literary agent. Neither they nor she were much good at sustaining a steady income, so her life was very often a struggle for basic shelter and daily necessities. She gradually became a serious alcoholic and in middle age was arrested for disturbing the peace and was briefly confined in a womens prison for psychiatric evaluation. Many assumed she had died when she disappeared from public view for decades, so when she reappeared, there was talk of a reincarnation. She thought neighbours in her village in Devon imagined her a witch, which she enjoyed. Her refusal to give in or give up finally gave her an aura, as if she were capable of magical transformations and reincarnations and possessed mysterious powers. She did nothing to dispel this idea.

But the life story can mislead the new reader of Rhys. She lied about her age and fooled her early critics if they failed to think carefully about the timeline of her life. Then the unwary reader may be lured into thinking her protagonists are Rhys herself, and that there is really therefore only one Rhys woman, recycled through different texts. But Rhyss texts ask her readers to absent themselves from the novels frequent affiliation with unexamined middle-class values and prejudices and live in her much less comfortable fictional world. She challenges us to take nothing for granted and to read her closely.