1966 and Wide Sargasso Sea: The Climate that Made Jean Rhys Legible

Helen Carr re-evaluates Jean Rhys whose reputation largely rests on the 1966 Wide Sargasso Sea. She argues that Rhys’ pre-war fiction is experimental in a way that unsettled contemporary readers, and that it was only with the publication of Wide Sargasso Sea that feminist critics caught up with her concerns with gender and racial identities. Carr argues that the ‘searing social critique’ of Wide Sargasso Sea so valued by 1960s feminists was already present in the earlier pre-war novels. She links Rhys to a new generation of women’s fiction which explored similar territory: Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963), Carter’s The Magic Toyshop (1967) and with Caribbean writers, such as Sam Selvon and George Lamming. Carr argues against an autobiographical reading of Rhys’ earlier fiction and suggests instead that her writing is deeply political and that those politics are always embodied in individual lives in her narratives.