Character and Themes in the Novels of Jean Rhys

Abstract

Jean Rhys, born in the West Indies in 1894, published five books between 1927 and 1939. Her first collection of stories was sponsored by Ford Madox Ford, and her four succeeding novels were praised by reviewers in England and America. But because of the outbreak of war in 1939, her books were not reprinted, and she dropped out of public attention. Then, in 1958, the BBC broadcast a dramatized version of her novel, Good Morning, Midnight. Its critical reception encouraged Rhys to publish some short stories which she had written and to begin work on the novel which in 1966 gained the highest praise of any of her writings, Wide Sargasso Sea. In it she tells the story of the first Mrs. Rochester, the shadowy figure whom Charlotte Bronte only lightly sketched in Jane Eyre. Wide Sargasso Sea is both an imaginative tour de force and a novel valuable in its own right. It places the earlier novels in a new perspective which shows that Jean Rhys is not one of the also-rans but a master of her genre. In her novels she depicts the character of one particular type of woman, while exploring certain human themes and constantly attempting to develop a close relationship between style and content. Her books are now again in print and are being read throughout the world, especially in Holland, Belgium, and France, where Pierre Leyris is translating her stories.1 Yet Rhys remains a mysterious figure-so much so that when, in 1969, the London Observer published Marcelle Bernstein's interview with her it was appropriately entitled The Inscrutable Miss Jean Rhys.2