In the following essay, Savory traces Rhys's development as a short story writer and describes her revision process.

In the following essay, Howells elucidates the defining characteristics of Rhys's late short fiction—particularly her central themes of gender and colonialism—through an examination of five of her stories.

In the following essay, Thomas examines the narrative structure and psychological dynamics of the relationship between Rochester and Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Sea.

In the following excerpt, Davidson discusses the importance of Rhys 's short fiction within her overall body of work.

In the following essay, Davidson offers analysis of the characters, narrative structure, and thematic concerns of After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie.

In the following essay, Tiffin discusses the portrayal of exploitative male-female relationships, distorted female self-identity, and imperialism in Rhys's fiction.

In the following essay, Nebeker discusses the presentation of female archetypes, mythic patterns, and shifting perspective in After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie.

In the following essay, Tiffin asserts that a few of Rhys's short stories—“Again the Antilles,” “The Day They Burned the Books,” and “Rapunzel, Rapunzel”—enact the recuperative strategies found in her novel Wide Sargasso Sea.

In the following essay, Thomas utilizes Rhys's “Let Them Call It Jazz” to discuss the tension between the West Indian colonial milieu of her writing and the modernist European perspective and places the story within an historical and feminist context.

In the following excerpt, Malcolm and Malcolm outline the defining characteristics of Rhys's short stories.

In the following essay, Baldanza provides analysis of the recurring themes, narrative strategies, and female protagonists in Rhys's fiction.

In the following excerpt, Staley examines the depiction of feminine consciousness in Rhys's later short fiction.

In the following essay, O'Connor delineates the connection between Paul Theroux's short stories “Zombies” and “The Imperial Ice House” and Rhys's unpublished story “The Imperial Road.”

In the following interview, which was conducted shortly before her death, Rhys discusses her life and writing career.

In the following essay, Lindroth studies the symbolic use of color in Rhys's short stories.

In the following excerpt, Miles discusses the depiction of female alienation and social subjugation in Rhys's fiction. "In the work of Jean Rhys," writes Miles, "female self-distrust and despair finds its extremest voice."

In the following essay, Morrell examines Rhys's world view as presented in four short stories that span her career.

In the following essay, Bamber provides an overview of Rhys's fiction, literary career, and critical reception.

In the essay below, Casey explores the development of strong female characters in Rhys's later short fiction.

Although some articles on Rhys have appeared in popular magazines, she has received little critical attention, especially from women, despite her exceptional technical skill and the relevance of her subject matter to the women's movement. Is Rhys's relentless portrayal of passive, helpless heroines simply unpalatable to feminist critics? Or, perhaps more seriously, does Rhys's unremitting pessimism become an artistic failure that drives us to dismiss her vision despite her insight and c...

In the following excerpt, De Abruña argues that Rhys's views, as demonstrated in her fiction, were anti-feminist.

In the following excerpt, Gregg offers thematic analyses of two of Rhys's West Indian stories: “Again the Antilles” and “Fishy Waters.”

In the following excerpt, Wilson explores the impact of Rhys's exile on her work.

In the following review, Pool offers negative analysis of Smile Please, citing flaws in the book's lack of structure and Rhys's unreflective content.

In the following excerpt, Gregg compiles letters and autobiographical sources in which Rhys comments on the craft of writing.

In the following essay, Carr discusses Rhys as an autobiographical writer.

In the following appreciative survey of Rhys's works, Alvarez maintains that the "purity of Miss Rhys's style and her ability to be at once deadly serious and offhand make her books peculiarly timeless. "

Jean Rhys's world, as seen in her three volumes of short stories, is a unified one. In every story a central consciousness, whether narrator, implied narrator, or protagonist, perceives and responds to reality in essentially the same terms. Rhys has said of her work: "I start to write about something that has happened or is happening to me, but somehow or other things start changing." One might argue that thus is all fiction forged. But in Rhys's work, the autobiographical beginn...

There are two explanations for Jean Rhys's extraordinary obscurity. One is simply the life she lived. (p. 28) As a literary life it was, one may say, unusual; and it separated her entirely from the centers of literary power, where reputations and careers are made.

[Jean Rhys's life is] a terrible story but an uncommon one in our century, which is more notable for the falls from glory that follow on a too eager appreciation of writers than for the neglect of talent, and it makes the publication of Miss Rhys's autobiography ["Smile Please"] an event of more than ordinary interest. What about this survivor? Who was the woman who wrote those remarkable novels in the first place? For remarkable they were and are—lean, hard, as frightenin...

[Jean Rhys's] heroines may be called Anna Morgan, Julia Martin, Marya Zelli, Sasha Jensen, but they are always Jean Rhys…. They are victims, of whom it would be beside the point to say that they are passive, acquiesce in their victimization, for, despite their ability to walk the boulevards of Paris and to buy an occasional hat, they are prisoners, and a novel like Good Morning, Midnight, in its claustrophobia, in its dispassionate recording of its protagonist's efforts to keep alive th...

The possibility of being substantially right in [one] way while being specifically wrong entails a stable world and a steady viewer…. Jean Rhys is many miles from such confidence, and her subdued, hesitating heroines live under something like the reverse [of this] rule. They and their tormentors can be specifically, superficially right a lot of the time, and still get the whole of the substance wrong; and Rhys herself is anxious not to claim too much for her own broken and threatened perceptions ...

Nearly all [Jean Rhys's] short stories and novels centre on a proud, sensitive woman, timidly putting out a hand for love and friendship and being continually rebuffed. For most the bottle becomes the only solace. The title story [of Sleep It off, Lady] starkly reflects this theme. Old Miss Verney, living alone in her country cottage could be Sasha Jensen of Good Morning, Midnight thirty years on. The vaguer fears of the younger woman are now concretised for Miss Verney into a large rat, real or imag...

Though many facts seem not so much got down as left discreetly floating [in Jean Rhys's "Smile Please"], this truncated effort at self-revelation is attractive, to us if not to its author, in part because of its slim, provocative fragmentariness. In truth, the fragment, the sketch, the unfinished canvas, and the shattered statue are all congenial to an age of relativity, indeterminacy, and agnosticism. Most of the oppressively complete books that labor for our attention would benefit, w...

In Rhys's autobiographical fragment [Smile Please], as in her fiction, life is outside, an indefinable and elusive otherness. Whether she longs to lose herself in a man, a place or an event, the woman can only put herself in the way of it, waiting for it to brush past and leave her even emptier of herself than before. Smile Please shows that Rhys's passion for loss came from the beauty and corruption of the island of Dominica, where the whites died young or went mad or drunk from the illegible...

Here, Chase praises Rhys for her ability to "bring to keen life the spiritual and physical atmosphere of the locales and eras she is writing about. "

Probably the most gratifying literary rediscovery of the 1960's was the revival of Jean Rhys…. And, thanks to that, we now have those fine, somber Rhys novels of the 1930's—largely about the lives of lonely women submerged in the depths of great cities…. Sean O'Faolain once remarked … that the art of the modern short story lies half in not-telling. It is the good reader's art to supply the silent half, quickly and accurately, for himself. And this is t...

[Jean Rhys's Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography, a] slight, initially rich and finally sketchy book is partly an autobiography; partly an attempt to put some of the record straight, after certain rumours about her first husband's honesty and her relationship with Ford Madox Ford; and partly an apologia for her inability to write her 'life' in the conventional sense. Jean Rhys is saying that, having used up her life in her stories, what more can she give, or what more do we...

It is sad to have to report that, after reading "Smile Please" and comparing it with Miss Rhys's autobiographical novels, one gets the impression that the novels give a much truer picture of her. While Miss Rhys herself edited her life for the novels, time and disillusionment edited that same life in "Smile Please" and the second distortion is greater. There's a fine vignette, for example, in "Good Morning, Midnight," in which the heroine goes into a s...

Jean Rhys thought that it was "idiotic to be curious about the person" of a writer, so when she embarked upon [Smile Please] at the age of eighty-six, she did so only to clear up the misunderstandings that invariably arose from her admittedly autobiographical novels…. [She has] left us the best kind of personal account. Fragmentary, impressionistic, and often quite guarded, Smile Please is always incandescent with the fascinating personality and unusual life of its author…. The s...

[Jean Rhys] must have been one of the most autobiographical novelists there has ever been, and it is impossible not to believe that the psychological truth about her life is in her novels, as well as an unusually large proportion of facts, even if she changed these about a little…. So in a way [her autobiography, Smile Please,] is disappointing. If you agree that Jean Rhys was a great writer, then, of course, it will also seem important, as everything she wrote must be….