Of course this was a memory in old age of a time of being really young, but the elderly Rhys could at least name the feeling she remembered from childhood about Dominica. This personal definition of Manichean ethical opposition is one strand of her apprehension of the environment, but she also understood complex interactions of the powerless, the powerful and place. Rhys reminds us not to romanticise, homogenise or become defeatist about human life or the environments on which that depends.

Her sense of the oppositional was shaped by her experience as a child in Dominica where she learned Protestant versus Catholic, French versus English and the tensions between white and black, poor and welloff, local and foreign. She fought these in adult life, wanting to reject her race, bucking the conventions of her class and gender, and giving up religion, but nothing seemed to defeat those entrenched identities. Oppositions also informed her later experience in Europe. She had an acute sense of being an outsider from the West Indies, poor and powerless in a world run by the rich and influential, and female in a maledominated world. Unlike Hegel's idea of the dialectic, Rhys's youthfully intense idea of the Manichean offers no hope of ultimate resolution of conflict. In her fictional world, both non-human and human are mostly controlled by the powerful, though sometimes nature exhibits vast power (most exemplified in Rhys's brief memoir on the volcanic eruption in Martinique in ‘Heat’).

Though her connection between suffering people and suffering nature can seem highly anthropomorphic, something more interesting is going on.