Modernism
Jean Rhys
1890 – 1979
British novelist (1890–1979)
- Dominica
- Caribbean
- Modernism
- Postcolonial Literature
About
Jean Rhys was a British Creole novelist who was born and grew up in the Caribbean island of Dominica. From the age of 16, she resided mainly in England, where she was sent for her education. She is best known for her final novel, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), written as a prequel to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre.
Source: Wikipedia (CC BY-SA). Portrait by Unknown authorUnknown author (Public domain) via Wikimedia Commons.
Life on the Timeline
Major Works
Exam Dossier
Most-asked topics
- Wide Sargasso Sea as prequel/counter-narrative to Jane Eyre
- Postcolonial and Caribbean Creole identity in Rhys's fiction
- Antoinette/Bertha Mason and the 'madwoman in the attic' revision
- Feminist and gender readings of Rhys's heroines
- Rhys and modernist narrative technique (fragmentation, multiple narrators)
- The 'Rhys woman' — displaced, exploited female protagonist
- Race, colonialism and the Creole/white Creole position in the Caribbean
- Rhys's early fiction and the Left Bank/Paris expatriate milieu
Previous-year themes
- Wide Sargasso Sea as a postcolonial rewriting of a canonical English novel
- Rhys's treatment of Caribbean/Creole identity and displacement
- Feminist critique of patriarchy and marriage in Rhys's fiction
- Narrative structure and multiple points of view in Wide Sargasso Sea
- Rhys's place within modernism and women's writing
- Symbolism of fire, mirrors and the attic in Wide Sargasso Sea
- Postcolonial theory (Spivak, 'the Other') applied to Rhys
Common confusions
- Confusing Jean Rhys's Antoinette/Bertha with Charlotte Brontë's Bertha Mason as though they were identical, rather than Rhys's reimagined prequel figure.
- Mixing up the chronology of Rhys's early novels (Quartet, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, Voyage in the Dark, Good Morning, Midnight).
- Assuming Rhys was English by birth rather than a white Creole born in Dominica.
- Conflating Rhys's modernist technique with the high Bloomsbury modernism of Woolf, when her milieu was the Paris Left Bank.
- Thinking Wide Sargasso Sea was Rhys's debut novel rather than her final, late-career work published after decades of obscurity.
- Forgetting that Rochester is never named in Wide Sargasso Sea, unlike in Jane Eyre.
Memory tricks
'Rhys = Rewrite' — remember Wide Sargasso Sea rewrites Jane Eyre from Bertha's side.
'Sargasso comes last' — Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) is her final novel, not her first.
'Dominica, not Domestic England' — Rhys was Caribbean-born, a Creole, not English by birth.
'Left Bank to Last Book' — her career runs from Paris expatriate stories to her late masterpiece.
'Rhys Woman = Rootless' — alliteration to recall her recurring vulnerable female protagonist type.
Order her four interwar novels alphabetically-by-decade: Quartet (20s), Mackenzie & Dark (30s), Midnight (30s-end).
