Jean Rhys crossed the Channel (in 1919) and channelled what we now call modernism, and what she called writing, by accident; as she wrote to her friend Peggy Kirkaldy on 6 December 1949:

Modernist malgré elle, artist mostly manqué, out of place, out of sync, out of sight for long decades of (self-imposed) obscurity, out of which she was ‘dragged back’ with the unexpected success of Wide Sargasso Sea in the 1960s, Rhys was always unprepared for the limelight, which, as she later intoned, came too late. Little did she know at the time that both the backward look and the use of the passive voice (‘I was dragged into writing’) would go on to become a signature style, proposed by her scholarly readers as key attributes of her unique blend of modernism.

Ella Gwendolyn Rees Williams was taken to Paris by her first husband, the Dutch writer and journalist Willem Johan Marie (called Jean) Lenglet. According to Martien Kappers-den Hollander,

But it was to help Jean make a name for himself that Jean was first dragged into writing. Before she met Ford Madox Ford, Rhys was matronised by Mrs H. Pearl Adam, a journalist she had met in London years before. Mrs Adam was eight years older than Jean and married to George Adam, the Times correspondent in Paris. She stayed with her for a while in 1922 just after the birth of her daughter, whom she eventually gave up for adoption.