As the foremost white West Indian writer of this century and author of the widely acclaimed novel Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys (1890-1979) has attracted much critical attention, most often from the perspective of gender analysis. Veronica Gregg extends our critical appreciation of Rhys by analyzing the complex relationship between Rhys's identity and the structures of her fiction, and she reveals the ways in which this relationship is connected to the history of British colonization of the West Indies. Gregg focuses on Rhys as a writer--a Creole woman analyzing the question of identity through literary investigations of race, gender, and colonialism. Arguing that history itself can be a site where different narratives collide and compete, she explores Rhys's rewriting of the historical discourses of the West Indies and of European canonical texts, such as Rhys's treatment of Jane Eyre in Wide Sargasso Sea. Gregg's analysis also reveals the precision with which Rhys crafted her work and her preoccupation with writing as performance.

“Enthralling.… Seymour powerfully evokes the world from which Rhys never really escaped, one of prejudice, abuse, and abuse’s shamefaced offspring, complicity.” —James Wood, The New Yorker An intimate, profoundly moving biography of Jean Rhys, acclaimed author of Wide Sargasso Sea. Jean Rhys is one of the most compelling writers of the twentieth century. Memories of her Caribbean girlhood haunt the four short and piercingly brilliant novels that Rhys wrote during her extraordinary years as an exile in 1920s Paris and later in England, a body of fiction—above all, the extraordinary Wide Sargasso Sea—that has a passionate following today. And yet her own colorful life, including her early years on the Caribbean island of Dominica, remains too little explored, until now. In I Used to Live Here Once, Miranda Seymour sheds new light on the artist whose proud and fiercely solitary life profoundly informed her writing. Rhys experienced tragedy and extreme poverty, alcohol and drug dependency, romantic and sexual turmoil, all of which contributed to the “Rhys woman” of her oeuvre. Today, readers still intuitively relate to her unforgettable characters, vulnerable, watchful, and often alarmingly disaster-prone outsiders; women with a different way of moving through the world. And yet, while her works often contain autobiographical material, Rhys herself was never a victim. The figure who emerges for Seymour is cultured, self-mocking, unpredictable—and shockingly contemporary. Based on new research in the Caribbean, a wealth of never-before-seen papers, journals, letters, and photographs, and interviews with those who knew Rhys, I Used to Live Here Once is a luminous and penetrating portrait of a fascinatingly elusive artist.

"A considerable tour de force by any standard." ?New York Times Book Review"

Julia Martin is in Paris and at the end of her rope. Once beautiful, she was taken care of by men. Now after being dropped by her latest lover, she visits London to see her ailing mother and meets up with her distrustful sister, Norah. This is a haunting picture of two desperate women in a desperate predicament.

Snow on the Cane Fields was first published in 1995. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. In a probing analysis of creole women's writing over the past century, Judith Raiskin explores the workings and influence of cultural and linguistic colonialism. Tracing the transnational and racial meanings of creole identity, Raiskin looks at four English-speaking writers from South Africa and the Caribbean: Olive Schreiner, Jean Rhys, Michelle Cliff, and Zoë Wicomb. She examines their work in light of the discourses of their times: nineteenth-century "race science" and imperialistic rhetoric, turn-of-the-century anti-Semitic sentiment and feminist pacifism, postcolonial theory, and apartheid legislation. In their writing and in their multiple identities, these women highlight the gendered nature of race, citizenship, culture, and the language of literature. Raiskin shows how each writer expresses her particular ambivalences and divided loyalties, both enforcing and challenging the proprietary British perspective on colonial history, culture, and language. A new perspective on four writers and their uneasy places in colonial culture, Snow on the Cane Fields reveals the value of pursuing a feminist approach to questions of national, political, and racial identity. Judith Raiskin is assistant professor of women's studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Presents new critical perspectives on Jean Rhys in relation to modernism, postcolonialism, and theories of affect.Jean Rhys (1890-1979) is the author of five novels and over seventy short stories. She has played a major figure in debates attempting to establish the parameters of postcolonial and particularly Caribbean studies, and although she has long been seen as a modernist writer, she has also been marginalized as one who is not quite in, yet not quite out, either. The 10 newly commissioned essays and introduction collected in this volume demonstrate Jean Rhyss centrality to modernism and to postcolonial literature alike by addressing her stories and novels from the 1920s and 1930s, including Voyage in the Dark, Quartet, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, and Good Morning, Midnight, as well as her later bestseller, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). The volume establishes Rhys as a major author with relevance to a number of different critical discourses, and includes a path-breaking section on affect theory that shows how contemporary interest in Rhys correlates with the recent 'affective turn' in the social sciences and humanities. As this collection shows, strangely haunting and deeply unsettling, Rhyss portraits of dispossessed women living in the early and late twentieth-century continue to trouble easy conceptualisations and critical categories.Key Features:- New and original work on Jean Rhyss fiction and short stories, highlighting key areas of her work.- Contributors area leading scholars on Jean Rhys from the US, the UK, and Australia, including Mary Lou Emery, Elaine Savory, John J. Su, Maroula Joannou, H. Adlai Murdoch, Rishona Zimring, Carine Mardorossian, Patricia Moran, Erica L. Johnson, and Sue Thomas.- Organised around 3 important themes: Rhys and modernism, postcolonial Rhys, and affective RhysPatricia Moran is the author of Word of Mouth: Body/Language in Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf; Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, and the Aesthetics of Trauma; and co-editor of Scenes of the Apple: Food and the Female Body in 19th and 20th-Century Womens Writing and The Female Face of Shame. Formerly Professor of English at the University of California, Davis, she is now Lecturer in English at the University of Limerick.Erica L. Johnson is an Associate Professor of English at Pace University in New York. She is the author of Caribbean Ghostwriting (2009) and Home, Maison, Casa: The Politics of Location in Works by Jean Rhys, Marguerite Duras, and Erminia DellOro (2003), and is the co-editor with Patricia Moran of The Female Face of Shame (2013).

Colonialism and the Modernist Moment in the Early Novels of Jean Rhys explores the postcolonial significance of Rhys’s modernist period work, which depicts an urban scene more varied than that found in other canonical representations of the period. Arguing against the view that Rhys comes into her own as a colonial thinker only in the post-WWII period of her career, this study examines the austere insights gained by Rhys’s active cultivation of her fringe status vis-à-vis British social life and artistic circles, where her sharp study of the aporias of marginal lives and the violence of imperial ideology is distilled into an artistic statement positing the outcome of the imperial venture as a state of homelessness across the board, for colonized and ‘metropolitans’ alike. Bringing to view heretofore overlooked émigré populations, or their children, alongside locals, Rhys’s urbanites struggle to construct secure lives not simply as a consequence of commodification, alienation, or voluntary expatriation, but also as a consequence of marginalization and migration. This view of Rhys’s early work asserts its vital importance to postcolonial studies, an importance that has been overlooked owing to an over hasty critical consensus that only one of her early novels contains significant colonial content. Yet, as this study demonstrates, proper consideration of colonial elements long considered only incidental illuminates a colonial continuum in Rhys’s work from her earliest publications.