The arresting, elliptical novels which the Dominican-born Jean Rhys wrote in the pre-war years were praised by a few for their artistry, but baffled and shocked many of her readers. Largely forgotten until the publication, in 1966, of Wide Sargasso Sea, her Caribbean retelling of Jane Eyre, Rhys is now increasingly recognized as a writer whose works are central texts for the imaginative re-examination of gender and colonial power relations. Helen Carr's account draws on both recent feminist and post-colonial theory, and places Rhys's work in the context of modernist and postmodernist writing. Whilst all Rhys's novels are autobiographical, it is a mistake, Carr argues, to see them simply in individual terms: Rhys uses the material of her own life to structure a devastating critique of the greed and cruelty of the Establishment world, both of Europe and of Empire.

Helen Carr is Lecturer in English at Goldsmiths College, University of London.