‘Strange Growths’?: Jean Rhys’s Second World War Material

Abstract

Jean Rhys’s stories ‘Temps Perdi’ (1967), ‘I Spy the Stranger’ (1966), ‘A Solid House,’ (1963), and ‘The Insect World’ (1973) do not figure in current scholarship on Second World War fiction. Versions of the first three were offered for publication in 1946. Rhys began writing ‘The Insect World’ in the mid-1940s. Rhys’s perspective in the fiction is that of an expatriate white Creole from Dominica, an island with formative Indigenous and French and British imperial histories. Focusing on ‘The Insect World’, ‘I Spy a Stranger’, and ‘Temps Perdi’, I analyse Rhys’s representations of temporalities of memory, ruin, loss of bearings, and hallucination and draw out the distinctive significance of the complex allusive and political reach of the fiction.