New Bearings for Jean Rhys

Revisionist narratives about women writers often feel urgent, but they have seemed especially pressing in the case of Jean Rhys. Several decades of Rhys scholarship have repositioned her transnationally, as both a Caribbean writer and a European modernist, in ways that complicate definitions of both identities. Critical and popular tendencies to read Rhys’s work as straightforwardly autobiographical have been particularly stubborn. Related to this is the sense that she must have written only from experience, rather than a broad cultural imagination. A good deal of criticism has shifted this impression, from Helen Carr’s Jean Rhys (2012) to recent work by Anna Snaith on Rhys’s musical references. The two new books reviewed here contribute to this enlarged understanding of Rhys as a sophisticated, worldly writer. Miranda Seymour’s new biography attends principally, of course, to the life. It is aligned with contemporary scholarship in seeing Rhys’s upbringing in and exile from the Dominica as central to all her work. But Seymour is careful to avoid what many have seen as Carole Angier’s mistake, in her 1990 biography, of using Rhys’s fiction to help document her life. Where Angier filled in gaps left by biographical sources with the experiences Rhys gave to her characters, especially in the early unpublished ‘Triple Sec’ (c.1924) and the so-called Left Bank fiction of the late 1920s and 1930s, Seymour is more circumspect, often explicitly distinguishing between the writer and the women she created. Challenging assumptions that in Walter Jeffries’s relationship with Anna in Voyage in the Dark (1934) we can see the beginnings of Rhys’s first serious love affair, with Lancelot Hugh Smith, Seymour suggests that ‘conventional Lancey would neither have slummed it at Southsea, nor gone shopping for ladies’ stockings’ (53). Instead, she points us to the short stories, ‘which contain far more autobiographical detail than her novels’ (53), including ‘After the Deluge’, whose narrator attends smart supper parties as an attendant to Miranda Seymour, I Used to Live Here Once: The Haunted Life of Jean Rhys, London:WilliamCollins, 2022, £25 hardback, ISBN: 9780008353254