Jean Rhys - The Art of Fiction Interview

“We moved here because I wanted a place of my own. We bought it—my late husband and I—sight unseen because anything was better than rooms. That’s all we’d been in. A room is, after all, a place where you hide from the wolves. That’s all any room is. It was difficult here at first. The gales came through the crevices. The mice were everywhere. A frog in the bathroom. Then when I first came here, I was accused of being a witch. A neighbor told the whole village that I practiced black magic. I got very cross, but gradually it all died down.”

Rhys was a brilliant writer who wrote about marginalized, uncanny, and often unlikable women.

Her postcolonial, gothic masterpiece Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) is a prequel to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, told from the point of view of Antoinette, “Bertha,” the “madwoman in the attic.” It explores themes of racism, alienation, isolation, and female suffering.