Given the sexual prejudice which fuelled this judgement, other feminist critics were slower than one might expect to follow up Judith Kegan Gardiner's suggestions. In fact, although newspaper and magazine articles so often saw the fate of Rhys’ heroines in terms of contemporary protests against male domination, feminist academic critics by no means welcomed her work unequivocally. Feminist criticism in the seventies concentrated either on nineteenth- century women or on contemporary feminist writers, and there was considerable uncertainty about whether Jean Rhys could be called a feminist writer. Many agreed with Helen McNeil that she ‘was feminine rather than feminist’. Her novels might depict patriarchal oppression, but feminists as well as non-feminists felt that her heroines connived too much in their own unhappiness. Jean Rhys herself in interviews was always unwelcoming to what she suspiciously called ‘Women's Lib’, which she felt simplified and distorted her life, and – yet again – patronized her. At a time when appearance was of intense symbolic importance to the feminist battle, she clearly had a quite unreconstructed love of make-up and pretty clothes. But most significantly, perhaps, the kind of feminist literary theory dominant in the seventies, which concentrated on sexual oppression and rarely took account of any other, was not yet ready to take on Rhys’ world where economic, racial, class, colonial and sexual oppressors all trample the disadvantaged. For all Rhys’ sharp attack on the ‘scorn and loathing for the female’ (VD 20) which she saw as embedded in English culture, she is not arguing simply that all men are, as the chorus-girls put it in Quartet, ‘swine, dearie, swine’ (Q 14). If there is any one form of oppression privileged over others in Rhys’ work, it is the power of money, but even that is never seen in isolation. Her heroines feel a bond with all those marginalized or trodden down. As Frances, in ‘Vienne’, one of Rhys’ earliest stories, says silently to the diminutive, deceived André: ‘Hail, brother Doormat, in a world of Boots’ (TABL 199).

During the eighties, feminist interest in Rhys grew, but, even so, in the revisionary studies of women modernists which appeared during that decade (only Virginia Woolf had previously figured much in feminist studies), Jean Rhys remained on the margins.