Jean Rhys

A critical reading of Rhys's entire oeuvre, including the stories and autobiography, informed by Rhys's own manuscripts and first published in 1999.

Elaine Savory (Author)

9780521033619, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 1 February 2007

332 pages
21.5 x 14 x 2 cm, 0.427 kg

"Despite the volume of critical work devoted to Jean Rhys, she remains an unplaceable writer. She was a modernist who insisted that she had never read many of her contemporaries...Throughout the book, avory martials extensive archival material in support of her argument, and she usefully emphasizes Rhys's intense professionalism. Rhys revised all of her work extensively, a craftman-like approach that has been too little appreciated by scholars." Studies in the Novel

Jean Rhys has long been central to debates in feminist, modernist, Caribbean, British and postcolonial writing. Elaine Savory's study, first published in 1999, incorporates and modifies previous critical approaches and is a critical reading of Rhys's entire oeuvre, including the stories and autobiography, and is informed by Rhys's own manuscripts. Designed both for the serious scholar on Rhys and those unfamiliar with her writing, Savory's book insists on the importance of a Caribbean-centred approach to Rhys, and shows how this context profoundly affects her literary style. Informed by contemporary arguments on race, gender, class and nationality, Savory explores Rhys's stylistic innovations - her use of colours, her exploitation of the trope of performance, her experiments with creative non-fiction and her incorporation of the metaphysical into her texts. This study offers a comprehensive account of the life and work of this most complex and enigmatic of writers.

Preface
Acknowledgements
List of abbreviations and note on the text
Chronology
1. Living on both sides, living to write
2. Registering protest: The Left Bank and Quartet
3. A Caribbean woman lost in Europe?: After Leaving Mr MacKenzie and the question of gender
4. Writing colour, writing Caribbean: Voyage in the Dark and the politics of colour
5. Dangerous spirit, bitterly amused: Good Morning, Midnight
6. People in and out of place: spatial arrangements in Wide Sargasso Sea
7. Brief encounters: Rhys and the craft of the short story
8. Performance arts: the theatre of autobiography and the role of the personal essay
9. The Helen of our wars: cultural politics and Jean Rhys criticism
Notes
Select bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]