Jean Rhys (1890-1979)

A selective list of online literary criticism and analysis for the twentieth-century British-Dominican novelist, short-story writer, and autobiographer, Jean Rhys, favoring signed articles by recognized scholars, and articles from peer-reviewed sources


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literary criticism

Barnes, Fiona R. Review of two books on Jean Rhys: Jean Rhys's Historical Imagination: Reading and Writing the Creole by Veronica Marie Gregg; and Snow on the Cane Fields: Women's Writing and Creole Subjectivity by Judith L. Raiskin. Signs 23 (Winter 1998) [first page only, jstor].

Ciolkowski, Laura E. "Navigating the Wide Sargasso Sea: colonial history, English fiction, and British empire." Twentieth Century Literature 43, 3 (Fall 1997) [sub ser, questia].

Linett, Maren. "'New words, new everything': fragmentation and trauma in Jean Rhys." Twentieth Century Literature 51, 4 (Winter 2005) [first page only, blurred, jstor].

Nardin, Jane. "'As Soon As I Sober Up I Start Again': Alcohol and the Will in Jean Rhys's Pre-War Novels." Papers on Language and Literature 42, 1 (Winter 2006) [sub ser, highbeam].

Nesbitt, Jennifer Poulos. "Rum Histories: Decolonizing the Narratives of Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea and Sylvia Townsend Warner's The Flint Anchor." Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 26 (Fall 2007).

Thomas, Sue. "Adulterous liaisons: Jean Rhys, Stella Bowen and feminist reading." Australian Humanities Review June 2001.

Thomas, Sue. "Rajni Walia, Women and Self: Fictions of Jean Rhys, Barbara Pym, Anita Brookner." Quodlibet: The Australian Journal of Trans-national Writing 1 (March 2005).

Zimring, Rishona. "The make-up of Jean Rhys's fiction." Novel: A Forum on Fiction 33, 2 (Spring 2000) [first page only, blurred, jstor].


introduction & web sites

"Jean Rhys, The Art of Fiction." The Paris Review 76 (Fall 1979).

Hulme, Peter. "Jean Rhys." An introduction to Jean Rhys, from the Literary Encyclopedia 21 January 2001 On Voyage in the Dark (1934); Wide Sargasso Sea (1966); Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography (1979) [subscription service].

Brief biography of Jean Rhys from the Imperial Archive Project.

An essay on Jean Rhys discusses her meaning to the people of Dominica, by Thomson Fontaine on The Dominican Net.

A brief introduction to Jean Rhys from publisher Penguin.

Journal of Caribbean Literature special Jean Rhys issue, table of contents only.

A web site examines Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, and Jean Rhys's "rewriting" of that novel in Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), as a form of resistance to the colonial project. Site is a project of MA students at Queen's University, Belfast.

see also postcolonial Jane Eyre.


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