SOURCE: "The 'Liberated' Woman in Jean Rhys's Later Fiction," in Revista/Review Interamericana, Vol. 4, No. 2, 1974, pp. 264-72.

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

Jean Rhys is best-known for her Wide Sargasso Sea, a novel that places her among West Indian writers for its concern with the alienation of the Creole after the Emancipation of 1833. Yet Wide Sargasso Sea is also significant in its rejection of the traditional belief in the superiority of men even in the most apparently equal male-female relationships that marks her works before World War Two. Within the same year as the publication of this novel, two scarcely known short stories—"I Spy a Stranger" and "Temps Perdi"—appeared that strike down even more fiercely at female submission to male dominance.

Critics tend to agree that the strength of Jean Rhys's early work is...