Making a Scene: Rhys and the Aesthete at Mid-Century

This essay reads Rhys’s “Let Them Call It Jazz” (1962) through a consideration of a triad of mid-20th century writers who inherited and transformed a tradition of British aestheticism. The writers considered here are Rhys, the experimental novelist and cultural critic Brigid Brophy, and the poet and jazz critic Philip Larkin. All imagined the artist/intellectual as an outsider, cultivated in their writing strong, even aggressive individualists whose work carried on the legacies of British aestheticism as defined by figures such as Pater and Wilde, and all were preoccupied with music. This essay makes a strong case for putting Rhys’s mid-century short fiction, along with other previously marginalized literary works, on the map of 20th-century postwar literary history.