Jean Rhys Books In Order

Quartet

The story of a woman on the edge caught in the stranglehold between her lover and his wife. When her husband is released from prison, the situation explodes.

After Leaving Mr Mackenzie

‘After Leaving Mr Mackenzie‘ is a brilliant, yet brutal, portrait of a woman struggling to retrieve both life and love. For six months, Julia has lived alone in a drab Parisian hotel on an allowance from her ex lover, Mr. Mackenzie. When his cheques stop, Julia decides to leave France and return to London. The tale of her ten day visit contains some of Jean Rhys’ most sensitive, poignant writing. Past her prime, exhausted by broken love affairs and addled by drink, Julia is tragically unable to find what she really wants love.

Voyage in the Dark

Rhys’s voice is starkly simple, yet sharp as nails. Autobiographically inspired, Rhys created stories of the slightly adrift every woman looking for an anchor in a cold, hostile landscape. Her hero*ine in Voyage in the Dark is Anna Morgan, a young woman in her late teens, relocated to England from her beloved home in the West Indies. She works as a chorus girl, traveling the country to dank boarding rooms and shabby theaters. Fortune seems to grab her one day in the shape of a wealthy, older man who sets her up in London, calling for her as his needs dictate. Anna falls in love with him, and allows herself to rely on him totally. When he grows tired of her, she begins a long spiraling decline. This is poignant, tense writing by the woman whom A. Alvarez called ‘the best living English novelist.’

Good Morning, Midnight

Jean Rhys was a talent before her time with an impressive ability to express the anguish of young, single women. In ‘Good Morning, Midnight‘ Rhys created the powerfully modern portrait of Sophia Jansen, whose emancipation is far more painful and complicated than she could expect, but whose confession is flecked with triumph and elation. One of the most honest and distinctive British novelists of the 20th Century, Jean Rhys wrote about women with perception and sensitivity in an innovative and often controversial way. In ‘Good Morning, Midnight‘ 1939 she creates an unforgettable portrait of a woman forced to confront her inevitable loneliness and despair.

Wide Sargasso Sea

The fortieth anniversary reissue of the best selling ‘tour de force’ Walter Allen, New York Times Book Review. Jean Rhys’s reputation was made upon the publication of this passionate and heartbreaking novel, in which she brings into the light one of fiction’s most mysterious characters: the madwoman in the attic from Charlotte Bront ‘s Jane Eyre.

A sensual and protected young woman, Antoinette Cosway grows up in the lush natural world of the Caribbean. She is sold into marriage to the coldhearted and prideful Rochester, who succumbs to his need for money and his lust. Yet he will make her pay for her ancestors’ sins of slaveholding, excessive drinking, and nihilistic despair by enslaving her as a prisoner in his bleak English home.

In this best selling novel Rhys portrays a society so driven by hatred, so skewed in its sexual relations, that it can literally drive a woman out of her mind.

Tigers Are Better Looking

Jean Rhys wrote about women and set her stories in Paris, London and the Caribbean. This is a collection of some of Rhys’ earliest work as well as a representive selection of her later work.

Sleep it Off, Lady

A collection of 16 short stories by the author of ‘Wide Sargasso Sea’, ‘Voyage in the Dark’ and ‘Good Morning, Midnight’.

The Collected Short Stories

‘Reading such stories as a group…
can be overwhelming. Yet it is precisely this intense immersion in experience that is the essence of Rhys’ art. The force of her stories lies in the fusion of elegant prose with an uncanny penetration of the darker reaches of the soul.’ Washington Post Book World Jean Rhys was one of the twentieth century’s foremost writers, a literary artist who made exqusite use of the raw material of her own often turbulent life to create fiction of memorable resonance and poignancy. Here for the first time in one volume are her complete stories.

Smile Please

Jean Rhys’ unfinished posthumous autobiography. From the early days on Dominica to the bleak time in England, living in bedsits on gin and little else, to Paris with her first husband, this is a lasting memorial to a unique artist.

The Letters of Jean Rhys

In her will, Jean Rhys expressed a wish that no biography of her should be written unless authorized during her lifetime. Following her death, her literary executor was approached frequently with requests for permission to write ‘an official life’. Finally he decided that, by compiling a volume of letters, authentic biographical information would be provided. But as the collection grew, the biographical aspect took on a secondary importance as the self portrait began to reveal the turbulent process of literary creation. The final result is a portrait spanning the years 1931 taking up the story roughly where it was left in ‘Smile Please’ to 1966, when the long struggle to finish ‘Wide Sargasso Sea’ was over.