Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Jean Rhys
-
Standard Name: Rhys, Jean
Birth Name: Ella Gwendoline Rees Williams
Pseudonym: Jean Rhys
Pseudonym: Ella Gray
Jean Rhys wrote a number of novels and short stories focusing on her own geographical and emotional alienation, as well as an unfinished autobiography. Her fiction from between the two world ward was largely forgotten when her final novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, brought her major success. After this her novels and short-story collections were translated into many languages, including French, Dutch, Belgian, Swedish, German, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Hungarian, Italian, Yugoslavian, Japanese, Czech, Spanish, and Turkish. Her autobiography was translated into French. Several of her novels and stories have been adapted for radio, film and television.
After he had been living for four years in France (scene of his relationships with Stella Bowen
and Jean Rhys
and of his editorship of the transatlantic review) FMF
travelled to the United States...
Literary responses
Patricia Highsmith
Critic Bob Wake
discusses Highsmith's complex point-of-view techniques—a literary style begun by Henry James
—and her modelling The Talented Mr Ripley on his novel The Ambassadors (1903). He notes her humorous plays on the James...
Textual Production
Susan Hill
The anthology of British women writers she published in 1990 with Michael Joseph
as The Parchment Moon: An Anthology of Modern Women's Short Stories was reprinted the following year as The Penguin Book of Modern...
Textual Production
Susan Hill
SH
was herself a contributor to People. In The Lighting of the Lamps, 1986, she collects her own critical essays (about reading, and about authors like Dickens
, John Wain
, and Jean Rhys
Family and Intimate relationships
Charlotte Eliza Humphry
Their daughter, Helen Pearl Humphry
(later known as H. Pearl Adam), was born in the same area of London in 1882 (her birth being registered in the second quarter), and, like her mother, she pursued...
Performance of text
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
Quartet, a film from Merchant-Ivory Productions
with screenplay by RPJ
(adapted from Jean Rhys
's novel first published under a different title in 1928), premiered at the CannesFilm Festival
.
Sucher, Laurie. The Fiction of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala: The Politics of Passion. Macmillan, 1989.
240
Long, Robert Emmet. The Films of Merchant Ivory. Harry N. Abrams, 1991.
112, 199
Intertextuality and Influence
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
The screenplay (as well as the Parisian location for the shooting) emphasizes the topographical background to a degree that Rhys
herself had not; the rendering of Rhys's original is arguably diluted in the finished...
Friends, Associates
Anna Kavan
After her relationship with Stuart Edmonds ended, AK
developed a large and close circle of friends who doted on her. Her friends were almost exclusively homosexual men, and she developed a reputation for not getting...
politics
Olivia Manning
As to gender politics, though she admired the suffragists and felt strongly about women's rights, she thought of herself not as a woman writer but as a writer who happened to be a woman, and...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elma Napier
Critic Elaine Campbell
commends EN
's handling of social inequalities: issues of sexual and racial social imbalance are presented with a poise and control that preserve the novel from deteriorating into a polemical tract.
For radio WP
wrote a play called Her Father's Daughter, 1998, and adapted the short story Let Them Call It Jazz by Jean Rhys
(dramatization 1997), the novel Indiana by George Sand
(1832; BBC Radio Four
Literary responses
Joan Riley
Some Black British commentators, like Maud Sulter
, felt JR
's tone was too pessimistic. This response was reported, though not endorsed, by Prabhu Guptara
in Black British Literature: An Annotated Bibliography (1986). As a...
