Jean Rhys

Jean Rhys was a Dominican-British novelist whose Wide Sargasso Sea gave Jane Eyre's madwoman her own voice, and whose earlier novels of female displacement and vulnerability were rediscovered as masterworks of twentieth-century fiction.

Jean Rhys published four novels between 1928 and 1939 — Quartet, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, Voyage in the Dark, Good Morning, Midnight — and then disappeared from public view for nearly three decades. The novels had been largely forgotten when she resurfaced in the 1960s to complete Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), which gave Bertha Mason — the Creole madwoman in the attic of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre — her own history, voice, and interiority. The novel became one of the most discussed works of postcolonial and feminist literary criticism, permanently altering how readers approach both texts.

Rhys’s early novels are written in a spare, apparently simple prose that conceals enormous precision. Her subject is women without money or protection — European women adrift in Paris and London between the wars, surviving on men who are seldom reliable. Voyage in the Dark (1934), the most autobiographical of the early novels, follows a West Indian chorus girl in London with an emotional honesty that was commercially unsuccessful at the time but has since been recognized as formally innovative.

Good Morning, Midnight (1939), her bleakest early novel, is her most technically accomplished: a fragmented interior monologue by a woman in Paris, drinking, remembering, failing to connect. It was championed by literary writers who recognized its quality before its reputation caught up. Rhys is now firmly in the canon of twentieth-century fiction, her early novels the subject of sustained academic attention. Wide Sargasso Sea in particular has never been more widely read or taught.