Linda Bamber
JEAN RHYS
Jean Rhys, who died in 1978 at age eighty-four, lived long
enough to ride the wheel of literary fashion full circle. Taken up by
Ford Madox Ford in the twenties, she was completely forgotten two
decades later.
In
1958 a British radio producer advertised for news of
her whereabouts; Rhys herself answered the ad from Devon and
subsequently resumed her literary career. Since the publication of
Wide Sargasso Sea
in 1966, there has been a steady growth of interest
in her stories and novels . One by one all her books of the twenties
and thirties have been reissued and enthusiastically reviewed; the
final accolade came several years ago when A. Alvarez, writing in
the
New York Times,
called her "the best living English novelist."
Recently, articles of literary criticism have begun to appear on
Rhys. Her readers seem confident that the job of evaluation is over
and that her books may be treated as classics .
It
would be interesting to know Rhys's own attitude towards her
second wave of literary success.
It
was clearly gratifying to her .at
some level; under its influence she wrote the later stories published
in the
New Yorker
and collected in
Sleep It Off, Lady
(1976). But Rhys
was a woman more comfortable with failure than with success, and
she apparently met her admirers with suspicion and some bitterness.
She saw herself as an outsider, someone beyond the pale of
respectable society; it is not surprising that she picked up on the
unpleasant, rather than the pleasant, parts of her growing fame.
Miriam Levine, the poet, interviewed Rhys in 1977 and reports that
her conversation was, at least initially, prickly and self-protective.
Rhys is quoted as follows :
I did a satiric piece on interviews called "Building Bricks Without
Straws." They did a terrible piece about me in
Womens Wear
Daily.
Mizener lied about me in his book on Ford . Some critic
sent me this long article comparing me to Ann Radcliffe. You're
not going to call me a Gothic novelist, are you?
Rhys is here playing the role she is most familiar with :
Establishment Victim, in this case the victim of the literary estab–
lishment. Yet the literary establishment these days is unanimous in
its enthusiasm for her work.
