The Emergence of a Form: Style and Consciousness in Jean Rhys's Quartet
1978; Duke University Press; Volume: 24; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/441128
ISSN2325-8101
Autores Tópico(s)Decadence, Literature, and Society
ResumoThe curious literary career of Jean Rhys has been well covered by the popular press and weekly reviews. The discovery and rediscovery of lost writers and new-found reputations is judged newsworthy, for stories such as hers confirm the collective mythologies of the struggling figure of the writer in the modern world, and thus feature stories with full picture spreads appear in the Sunday supplements of the Times and Observer. The high and low points of her bizarre life and career have been recorded and misrecorded by nearly a dozen interviewers.2 In England she became a minor cult figure, posing for fashion shots in the mass media; in America she has been featured in W, the chic production of Women's Wear Daily, and Ms.3 Lurking behind these poses of an eighty-year-old woman commenting on clothes and her own painful hegira from the West Indies, the provincial towns of England, half a dozen European capitals, and finally to a remote cottage in Devon is the novelist who struggled off and on for years with her art against devastating disappointments and what seemed certain failure. These color photographic portraits bring home to me Susan Sontag's accusation that there is something predatory in photography-the subject is somehow violated. Even with success and great age, Rhys has not escaped from her own fictional heroines. Only after Wide Sargasso Sea was published in 1966, when she was seventy-two, and won the Smith Literary Award did any substantial literary recognition come to her.4 Its success resulted in the republication of her novels by Andre Deutsch, and, later, the reprinting of them
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