Jean Rhys

Jean Rhys (1890-1979) is the author of five novels and over seventy short stories. The essays collected in Jean Rhys: Twenty-First-Century Approaches demonstrate Rhys’s 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 section on affect theory that shows how contemporary interest in Rhys correlates with the recent “affective turn” in the social sciences and humanities. Strangely haunting and deeply unsettling, Rhys’s portraits of dispossessed women living in the early and late twentieth-century continue to trouble critical categories and easy conceptualisations of the periods her work spans.