Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations and note on the text
- Chronology
- 1 Living on both sides, living to write
- 2 Registering protest: The Left Bank and Quartet
- 3 A Caribbean woman lost in Europe?: After Leaving Mr MacKenzie and the question of gender
- 4 Writing colour, writing Caribbean: Voyage in the Dark and the politics of colour
- 5 Dangerous spirit, bitterly amused: Good Morning, Midnight
- 6 People in and out of place: spatial arrangements in Wide Sargasso Sea
- 7 Brief encounters: Rhys and the craft of the short story
- 8 Performance arts: the theatre of autobiography and the role of the personal essay
- 9 The Helen of our wars: cultural politics and Jean Rhys criticism
- Notes
- Select bibliography
- Index
2 - Registering protest: The Left Bank and Quartet
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations and note on the text
- Chronology
- 1 Living on both sides, living to write
- 2 Registering protest: The Left Bank and Quartet
- 3 A Caribbean woman lost in Europe?: After Leaving Mr MacKenzie and the question of gender
- 4 Writing colour, writing Caribbean: Voyage in the Dark and the politics of colour
- 5 Dangerous spirit, bitterly amused: Good Morning, Midnight
- 6 People in and out of place: spatial arrangements in Wide Sargasso Sea
- 7 Brief encounters: Rhys and the craft of the short story
- 8 Performance arts: the theatre of autobiography and the role of the personal essay
- 9 The Helen of our wars: cultural politics and Jean Rhys criticism
- Notes
- Select bibliography
- Index
Summary
I think French books helped me an awful lot … They had clarity. Ford insisted – if you weren't sure of a paragraph or statement, translate it into another language. And if it looks utterly silly, get rid of it. Anglo-Saxon is rather messy, don't you think?
(Jean Rhys to Mary Cantwell, Interview (1974) 1990: 24)Cut it? Thats nearly always the answer. Cut bits of it [cut] … Ive looked up self-pity in my French dictionary & cant find it. Only ‘amourpropre’ or ‘egoism’ [sic]. It can be the start of a lot of things but can be tiresome too I know. Perhaps there's too much in ‘Postures’. That book could be improved by cutting.
(Letter to Diana Atwell, 1 December 1966)Rhys made an impressively swift transition from an amateur writer of therapeutic diaries, with the instinct to use writing to erase painful memories, to a professional and impressive writer who was reviewed in powerful literary publications: a process which took only three years. Furthermore, she reworked what she learned from Ford, i.e. the prevailing style of European high modernism and how to be a professional writer, in the light of her writing instincts and what was important from her West Indian experience.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Jean Rhys , pp. 36 - 56Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999