Yet one can perceive the main currents of her life and how these relate to her fiction, in which she gives shape and clarity to experience.
The issue of the placement of Jean Rhys as a writer has been raised often. Despite her Caribbean birth and upbringing, her move to live in England at the age of sixteen displaced her from direct, prolonged contact with Caribbean culture for the rest of her life. Her early work has a continuous subtext of reference to the Caribbean, and certainly her great work Wide Sargasso Sea is centered there, but critics have varied in their perception of her, often reflecting their own concerns in their readings. Feminist critics, such as Helen Nebeker, Nancy R. Harrison, and Deborah Kelly Kloepfer focus on Rhys's portrayal of the political frames around women, whereas Louis James and Teresa O'Connor focus on her identity as a Caribbean writer and the links between colonialism and the situation of women in her work. Poet and historian Edward Kamau Brathwaite writes, in his essay on Caribbean culture Contradictory Omens (1974), "White creoles in the English and French West Indies have separated themselves by too wide a gulf and have contributed too little culturally, as a group," to be identified with "the spiritual world on this side of the Sargasso Sea," a statement which can be read as excluding Rhys from full membership in Caribbean identity.
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