Rhys, Jean (1890-1979)

Abstract

Jean Rhys was a Dominican novelist and short-story writer. Her career can be divided into two main periods: her modernist fiction of the 1920s and 1930s, which depicts the bohemian demi-monde in Europe of the time as experienced by vulnerable female protagonists on the margins of respectability, and her later work, which came after a long hiatus with the publication of Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). Wide Sargasso Sea, her best known novel, is a prequel to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, and an important text within postcolonial studies.