Jean Rhys

Jean Rhys (1890–1979) was a British novelist and short-story writer born in Dominica. Her fiction often portrays displaced women, and Wide Sargasso Sea reimagines the life of the woman confined in Jane Eyre.

Wide Sargasso Sea: Jean Rhys’s 1966 novel reimagines the life of Antoinette Cosway, the woman who becomes Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre. This late novel brought Rhys renewed recognition by giving a history to Brontë’s confined character.
Good Morning, Midnight: Jean Rhys’s 1939 novel follows Sasha Jansen, an isolated woman living in Paris. Its close focus on Sasha’s insecurity and memory exemplifies Rhys’s urban fiction.
Dominica: An island country in the eastern Caribbean where Jean Rhys was born and raised. Rhys’s memories of Dominica informed the Caribbean setting and colonial tensions of Wide Sargasso Sea.
Feminist literary criticism: The study of literature through questions of gender, power, and the representation of women. Rhys’s novels invite attention to how male authority and economic dependence shape women’s lives.
Jane Eyre: Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 novel follows Jane Eyre’s life from childhood to adulthood and marriage. Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea revisits the earlier novel’s Bertha Mason from another perspective.
Voyage in the Dark: Jean Rhys’s 1934 novel follows Anna Morgan, a young woman from the Caribbean living in England. Anna’s displacement makes the contrast between Rhys’s Caribbean-born protagonists and metropolitan life especially clear.
Edwardian England: The period of British history during Edward VII’s reign, from 1901 to 1910. Rhys moved to England as a teenager, entering a society markedly different from her Caribbean upbringing.
The Madwoman in the Attic: Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s 1979 study of women writers and female characters in Victorian literature. Its influential reading of Bertha Mason made Rhys’s reinterpretation of that character especially resonant.
Postcolonial literature: Literature engaging with the histories and continuing effects of colonialism and empire. Rhys’s Caribbean settings and colonial power relations connect her fiction to this broad literary field.
After Leaving Mr Mackenzie: Jean Rhys’s 1931 novel follows Julia Martin, a financially precarious woman in Paris and London. Julia’s dependence on unstable relationships is an early instance of Rhys’s recurring social predicament.

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Virgin IslandsRelated: Her work offers a literary point of comparison for Caribbean colonial histories.