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ABSTRACT
Jean Rhys's corpus is known for its continual rewriting and revisiting, yet scholarship on Rhys's reimagining of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre has concentrated on its extensive treatment in Wide Sargasso Sea. When traces of Brontë are found in Rhys's earlier works, they are most commonly understood as foreshadowings of Rhys's final novel, a position that figures Rhys's corpus as a practice of practising, whose potential is finally realized late in Rhys's life and career. This article, instead, emphasizes Rhys's sustained creative practice of rewriting, presenting her engagement with Brontë not in linear or developmental terms, but as a long-standing critical fascination worked out and through all of her novels. Traces of Bertha's distress, Rochester's control, and rooms that restrict and depress recur across Quartet (1928), After Leaving Mr. MacKenzie (1930), Voyage in the Dark (1934), and Good Morning, Midnight (1939). We show that Brontë's novel was a major influence on the settings, characterizations, and preoccupations across Rhys's earlier novels, arguing that Jane Eyre is a fundamental part of Rhys's imaginary and Bertha is an inextricable aspect of Rhys's protagonists.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Thomas, Jean Rhys’s Modernist Bearings, 2. See too Johnson and Moran, “Introduction: The Haunting of Jean Rhys,” in Jean Rhys: Twenty-First-Century Approaches, 3.
2 See, for example, GoGwilt, The Passage of Literature, 65; Lopoukhine, Regard and Wallart, “Introduction,” in Transnational Jean Rhys, 5; Snaith, Modernist Voyages; Thomas, Jean Rhys’s Modernist Bearings, 9; Colesworthy, Returning the Gift, 106–14; Taylor-Batty, “‘Le Revenant’: Baudelaire’s Afterlife in Wide Sargasso Sea,” 665–688; Lorphelin, “The Voices of Others,” 164; and Savory, “The White Creole in Paris” in Transnational Jean Rhys.
3 McClure Smith “I Don’t Dream About it Any More,” 113.
4 For example, Lorphelin, “The Voices of Others”; Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts”; Rubik and Mettinger, A Breath of Fresh Eyre; Brown, “Textual Entanglement.”
5 Rhys, Letters 1931–1966, 296.
6 Ibid., 297.
7 Vreeland, “The Art of Fiction,” 235.
8 Rhys, Letters 1931–1966, 156.
9 See, for example, Erica L. Johnson and Patricia Moran, “Introduction: The Haunting of Jean Rhys,” in Jean Rhys: Twenty-First-Century Approaches; Rhys, Letters 1931–1966, 213; 50; 186.
10 Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight, 78–79.
11 Rhys, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, 8.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid., 107–108.
14 Rhys, “I Spy a Stranger,” 232–45, 236.
15 Ibid., 239.
16 Ibid., 240–1.
17 Ibid., 241.
18 We thank the anonymous reviewer for their excellent suggestion.
19 Rhys, Quartet, 94–5.
20 Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight, 78.
21 Rhys, “I Spy a Stranger,” 244.
22 Rhys, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, 149.
23 Rhys, Quartet, 82.
24 Ibid., 123.
25 Ibid., 92.
26 Ibid., 126.
27 Brontë, Jane Eyre, 384.
28 Rhys, Quartet, 56.
29 Ibid., 106–107.
30 Brontë, Jane Eyre, 384–5.
31 Rhys, Quartet, 4.
32 Ibid., 4, 15.
33 Ibid., 147.
34 Ibid., 92.
35 Brontë, Jane Eyre, 372.
36 Brontë, Jane Eyre, 403.
37 J.C. Prichard, “A Treatise on Insanity,” 6. See too Small, Love’s Madness, 163–4.
38 Brontë to W.S. Williams, as cited in Wise and Symington, eds., The Brontës, 173–4. Also Small, Love’s Madness, 65.
39 Rhys, “I Spy a Stranger,” 238.
40 Rhys, Quartet, 91.
41 Rhys, Voyage in the Dark, 66.
42 Rhys, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, 5.
43 Ibid., 6.
44 Ibid., 7.
45 Rhys, Voyage in the Dark, 77.
46 Rhys, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, 5.
47 Brontë, Jane Eyre, 403.
48 Rhys, “I Spy a Stranger,” 242–4.
49 Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight, 89.
50 Rhys, Voyage in the Dark, 26.
51 Brontë, Jane Eyre, 529; Tompkins, “Jane Eyre’s ‘Iron Shroud’,” 195–7.
52 Bartky, “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power,” 67–8.
53 Rhys, Quartet, 91.
54 Rhys, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, 47.
55 Ibid., 24.
56 Rhys, Voyage in the Dark, 124.
57 Brontë, Jane Eyre, 382.
58 Rhys, Voyage in the Dark, 95.
59 Ibid., 120.
60 Carole Angier, “Introduction,” Voyage in the Dark, vii.
61 Brontë, Jane Eyre, 370–1.
62 Rhys, “Mr. Howard’s House. Creole,” 6.
63 Ibid., 5–6.
64 Linett, “New Words, New Everything,” 446.
65 Rhys, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, 131–3.
66 This is also noted by Rovera, “The ‘Seeds of Madness’ in Wide Sargasso Sea,” 114.
67 Kime Scott, “Voyage in the Dark: Part IV (Original Version),” 388. [punctuation and spacing in original].
68 Ibid., 389.
69 Rhys, “Mr. Howard’s House. Creole,” 5.
70 Rovera, “Jean Rhys’s Phantom Manuscript,” 194.
71 Ibid.
72 Moran and Johnson, “Encryption as Transmission” in Transnational Jean Rhys. See too Mirmohamadi, “I so wanted to hand Emma a copy of Wide Sargasso Sea,” in Transnational Jean Rhys.
73 Burton, “Jean Rhys: Interviewed by Peter Burton,” 108.
74 Brontë, Jane Eyre, 403.
75 Ibid.
76 Rhys, “Who Knows What’s Up in the Attic?” 358.
77 Ibid., 357.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Amy Walford
Amy Walford graduated from the University of Waikato with a Master of Arts in English in December 2022. Her research interests include feminist and modernist literature, particularly the works of Virginia Woolf and Jean Rhys.
Maebh Long
Maebh Long is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Waikato. Her research interests include modernist literature and the medical humanities. She is the author of Assembling Flann O'Brien (2014), the editor of The Collected Letters of Flann O'Brien (2018) and the co-editor of New Oceania: Modernisms and Modernities in the Pacific (2019). Maebh is currently leading a project, funded by the Royal Society of New Zealand, which examines the ways ‘immunity’ became a contagious metaphor for modernist writers.