SOURCE: O'Connor, Teresa F. “Jean Rhys, Paul Theroux, and the Imperial Road.” Twentieth Century Literature 38, no. 4 (winter 1992): 404-14.

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delineates the connection between Paul Theroux's short stories “Zombies” and “The Imperial Ice House” and Rhys's unpublished story “The Imperial Road.”

Toward the end of her life Jean Rhys offered many of the private papers and manuscripts still in her possession for sale through the booksellers Bertram Rota, Ltd. Their catalogue listed an unpublished story, “The Imperial Road,” with the notation: “Miss Rhys has stated that her publishers declined to include this story in Sleep It Off, Lady, considering it to be too anti-negro in tone” (7). The story was never published and its major components never appeared in any of Rhys's other work.¹ Though I was familiar with the manuscript, two stories in Paul Theroux's collection World's End spurred my interest in a closer reading...