Wide Sargasso Sea [antikvár]

Pref ace Several years after Wide Sargasso Sea was published, A. Alvarez declared in the New York Times Book Review that Jean Rhys was the "best living English novelist," a claim that simultaneously validated and misrepresented Rhys's literary standing. Indeed, after a lifetime of writing and struggling to write while suffering the miseries of poverty, isolation, alcoholism, and illness, Rhys was gratified by the widespread recognition of her work that finally came to her late in life. But it is an irony that Rhys, who always hated England and English culture and who perceived herself to be, as a displaced colonial, the object of English disdain and hatred, should be declared a light of English culture and made, at the age of 88, a Commander of the Order of the British Empire for her contributions to literature. Jean Rhys was born in 1890 on the Caribbean island of Dominica to a Welsh father and a "white Creole" mother whose family had had great influence on the island for generations. In 1907 Rhys left Dominica, as did many colonial children, to pursue her education in England. Although she never returned to the Caribbean, except for a short trip in 1936, and although she spent most of her life in small, remote English villages, she never considered herself to be English and remained throughout her life an incisive and bitter critic of what she perceived to be English values. The circumstances that made it impossible to return to Dominica-lack of money, two world wars, several marriages, a tendency toward despondency and despair, and the changing political and cultural status of the English colonies—were also the circumstances that made it difficult for Rhys to write, particularly when she dedicated herself to Wide Sargasso Sea, which deals directly with colonialism, European dominance in the Caribbean, and the hypocrisies of English culture. It took Rhys twenty-one years to write this short novel, years that we can see with hindsight were crucial to the development of feminist, anticolon-ial, postmodern perspectives that would permit critics to recognize Rhys as one of the foremost novelists, English or not, of her time. The Text Jean Rhys first mentions working on what was to become Wide Sargasso Sea in October 1945. Although the book was not finished and pub-