In all cases, the heroine is passive, but “sentimental.” The reader is interested in her feelings, rather than in her ideas and accomplishments. All four of these novels show a female character subject to financial, sexual, and social domination by men and “respectable” society.
In Good Morning, Midnight, the alcoholic Sasha Jensen, penniless in Paris, remembers episodes from her past which have brought her to this sorry pass. Voyage in the Dark tells the story of Anna Morgan, who arrives in England from the West Indies as an innocent young girl, has her first affair as a chorus girl, and descends through a series of shorter and shorter affairs to working for a masseuse. Mackenzie, and finds herself financially desperate. Mackenzie, the central figure, Julia Martin, breaks off with her rich lover, Mr. The central figure is a woman alone, penniless, exploited, and an outsider. Hugh becomes Marya’s lover, while Lois punishes her with petty cruelties. The heroine, Marya Zelli, whose husband is in prison, moves in with the rich and respectable Hugh and Lois Heidler. Jean Rhys’s first novel, Quartet, reflects closely her misadventures with Ford Madox Ford. As prizes and honors came to her in her old age after the publication of Wide Sargasso Sea, it must have given her grim satisfaction to realize that she had attained entirely by her own efforts a position as a writer at least equal to that of her erstwhile friends. She began to publish her writing under the encouragement of her intimate friend Ford Madox Ford, and she continued to write in spite of falling out of favor with his circle. Although she owes her current reputation in large measure to the rising interest in female writers and feminist themes, her work belongs more properly with the masters of literary impressionism: Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, Marcel Proust, and James Joyce.
Rhys played a noteworthy role in the French Left Bank literary scene in the 1920’s, and between 19, she published four substantial novels and a number of jewel-like short stories. Such praise is overstated, but Rhys’s fiction, long overlooked by academic critics, is undergoing a revival spurred by feminist studies. When Wide Sargasso Sea, her last novel, was published, Jean Rhys (24 August 1890 – ) was described in The New York Times as the greatest living novelist. Analysis of Jean Rhys’s Novel Wide Sargasso Sea
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