Biographies of Lady Hale refer routinely to her as a ‘homemaker as well as a judge’. Although her career is not exactly short of alternative inspiration for the byline writer or public lecture compere, the phrase is almost ubiquitous. When introducing Lady Hale’s recent Chatham House lecture on ‘Legal Determinants of Health’, Professor Lawrence Gostin emphasised the ‘homemaker’ motif in his introduction as he explained – while gesturing at Lady Hale – it ‘just so expresses who you are’ and the ‘humility that you have’. As Auchmuty and Rackley demonstrate, biographies of legal women so often ‘insert men into the picture’ by placing their successes in a heterosexual context. Describing Lady Hale as a ‘homemaker’, they argue, follows this same pattern by emphasising her ‘traditional’ success in finding a husband and bearing children, rather than her unprecedented career. The source is, however – as Auchmuty and Rackley recognise – Lady Hale herself. The full excerpt in her self-penned biography on the Supreme Court website reads: ‘A homemaker as well as a judge, she thoroughly enjoyed helping the artists and architects create a new home for the Supreme Court.’

Introduction

This chapter examines what COVID-19 and the response to it has revealed, in the context of housing and homelessness. Our argument is that responses have been limited by what is deemed possible by current housing politics. It goes on to consider the possibilities for a different housing politics, postpandemic, suggesting that we need to find something new, something between the promotion of the entrepreneurial individual and a collective response characterized by uniformity, exclusion and authoritarianism. Perhaps the description of classical music's response to COVID-19 restrictions may provide a useful metaphor. Socially distanced performances and reduced numbers of instrumentalists produce what has been described as an ‘orchestra of soloists’. Applied to housing, this suggests a possibility of combining the individual expression of identity through home and housing simultaneously with a collective effort to achieve a minimum standard of provision. The method may be as important as the goal. We should not be afraid to explore alternatives, to trial messy and slow interventions as long as they reflect an inclusive, democratic and accountable politics as we search for an alternative to the current failed model of marketized housing provision and a discredited albeit collective past.

Housing, homelessness and COVID-19

COVID-19 ratchets up the cruel consequences of the poor-quality housing and homelessness provision that have been a long-standing feature of England's housing settlement. Mortality statistics suggest a correlation between likelihood of death from the virus and overcrowded, shared or temporary housing, a correlation with particularly devastating implications for BAME people who are disproportionately poorly housed. Housing conditions make it difficult to self-isolate, shared facilities enable the spread of the virus, and a lack of access to outside space exacerbates poor mental and physical health. Living on the streets puts those whose life expectancy is already dramatically reduced – pre-pandemic a street homeless man could expect to live to 47 and a woman to 43 – at increased risk from the virus and increases the vulnerabilities of those front line services which work with them. While a £3.2m initiative to provide emergency accommodation provided shelter for 15,000 street homeless people, the accommodation did not work for many rough sleepers; meanwhile new populations of street homeless have emerged, stimulated by job losses, relationship breakdown, and the intensification of domestic violence and mental health issues that have been a feature of lockdown.

In Wide Sargasso Sea, it is clear that Rhys is very directly writing back to a metropolitan text, but the counter-discoure that she has honed there is present to a greater or lesser degree in all her work. I want to end with some further comments on Rhys’ ‘struggle for the sign’, and the nature and form of the counter-discourse which she evolves. Like other postmodernist and postcolonialist writers – and whilst those two categories by no means always coincide, many of their strategies do – Rhys in her fictions unpicks and mocks the language by which the powerful keep control, while at the same time shifting, bending, re-inventing ways of using language to open up fresh possibilities of being. She questions and destabilizes the hegemonic language which seeks to define her in its terms, rewriting, in her Creole hand, the metropolitan script. As Spivak puts it, ‘in post-coloniality, every metropolitan definition is dislodged. The general mode for the post-colonial is citation, reinscription, re-routing the historical.’ Rhys ‘protest[s] loudly’ in her fiction, as she did in the Bromley courtroom, against intolerance and injustice, yet at the same time she recreates and reshapes language to map the unknown and uncharted world of ambivalence. Both protest and creation are integral to her writing, one of whose distinctive features is its fusion of apparently contrary elements – rage and reverie, farce and feeling, speech and poetry, satirical critique and psychic depth. If the melancholy haze through which her work is too often read has led critics to simplify and sentimentalize the psychology of her heroines, it has even more obscured the fact that she is a savagely funny writer, a witty and incisive deconstructionist, whose deconstruction is a necessary part of her struggle to find a narrative form through which to chart the subjectivity of those on the margins. The old Jew in Good Morning, Midnight, with his banjo and mocking, tender, painful songs, is perhaps an image of the kind of artist Rhys is herself, her version of Wallace Stevens’ ‘Man with the Blue Guitar’. Indeed, perhaps Serge's art as a whole is an image of hers. Like Rhys, he is an outsider, who paints outsiders: just as he/Rhys tells the story of the mulatto woman's suffering, so his paintings portray society's outcasts, the old Jew in the gutter, misshapen dwarfs, prostitutes old and young.

Early in the novel we are introduced to Sasha's strategies for keeping her sense of disintegration and worthlessness at bay. She organizes her life as a series of rituals; designed, like the rituals of long-term prisoners, to hold on to some control over her own being (’a place to eat at midday, a place to eat at night, a place to have my drink … I have arranged my little life’); designed to evade hostility, fear, the destructive definitions of other people:

She plans ways to ensure that ‘Tomorrow I'll be pretty again, tomorrow I'll be happy again, tomorrow, tomorrow… ‘ (GMM 48). She constantly re-invents herself: a new hair-dye, a new hat, another visit to the lavabo mirror to cover up tears with powder, to construct a new face, to make herself up, in both senses of the phrase. All Rhys’ protagonists are creative artists: creating themselves is their only steady occupation. Even so, they can never rival the ‘charming, malicious’ dolls Sasha saw in the fashion house: ‘What a success they would have made of their lives if they had been women. Satin skin, silk hair, velvet eyes, sawdust heart – all complete’ (GMM 16).

Looking-glasses (both ‘looking-glasses I look nice in, lookingglasses I don't’) are a leitmotiv in Rhys’ work, perhaps for much the same reasons as they were in the paintings of the women surrealists. Her protagonists spend a good deal of time looking in mirrors, sometimes at photos, even at ghosts of themselves, descending into the unknown, searching for some understanding of their being which is other than the definitions thrust upon them. Tiffin suggests that, for the white Creole, the impossibility of identifying either with the English or with the black Caribbeans is what makes so imperative the search in the looking-glass for an alternative image.

In 1936, the year before Rhys paid the visit to Paris on which she began Good Morning, Midnight, she had returned for two months to Dominica with her second husband Leslie Tilden Smith. It was a significant and highly charged return, and she was to spend the next thirty years working out its implications in fictional form. The Caribbean had, as I have stressed, always been a significant presence in her fiction. Andrew Thacker suggests that, in reading Rhys, it is important not simply ‘to focus upon one of the two geographies in her work: either the metropolitan centres of Paris, London and Vienna, or the Caribbean influences upon her fiction’; rather, he believes, ‘a fuller understanding of her fiction must examine how her texts voyage between these two geographies, capturing the shifting shapes of her own prose journeys’. He goes on to illustrate this through the 1934 novel, Voyage in the Dark, in which past and present, Dominica and London, intermingle more overtly than in any other Rhys text. Yet that both ‘geographies’ are always in some ways present is true of all her novels, even in the ‘continental’ ones whose heroines have no overt link to the Caribbean. Alec Waugh, Evelyn Waugh's travel writer brother, was one of the first to comment on this. He had met Rhys in England, and mentioned her in passing in an article that he wrote on Dominica in 1948. This was when her reputation was at its lowest, and he makes it clear he does not expect many of his readers to have heard of her: ‘Her novels have not reached a large public,’ he writes somewhat apologetically, ‘but they have a personal flavour.’ He then goes on to say; ‘Rereading After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, I could see how many flashbacks to Dominica – imperceptible to the unacquainted reader – occurred in it. I could see how Dominica had coloured her temperament and outlook.’ Both After Leaving Mr Mackenzie and Voyage in the Dark had appeared before that return home, and, as Peter Hulme has argued, after the 1936 visit Rhys’ Caribbean past assumes a different and more complex importance in her fiction.

The cycles of resistance and defeat, self-creation and despair, mockery and mourning, are repeated again and again in this novel. Sasha describes her failed attempt to drink herself to death, after she has been finally disowned on behalf of her family by a nameless ‘extremely respectable’ relative, since she has had the temerity to stay alive, which in his eyes, no self-respecting fallen woman should do.

Despair, defiance, desolation: the condition of the marginal, the unacceptable, those without country, those who don't belong, those caught up in the ‘unwinnable war’ of the excluded. Sasha is not the only straw in the metropolitan whirlpool. Good Morning, Midnight is the darkest of Rhys’ novels, not surprisingly given its date. Its emotional violence and explosiveness, the intensity and brutality of the intolerance it registers, the desperation it charts in those excluded, all suggest Rhys’ sense of the coming apocalypse.

Although I have criticized those autobiographical readings of Rhys’ work that identify her literally with her heroines and reduce the scope of her work to an individual plight, in the sense that she draws on the material of her own life, an autobiographical writer is of course what she is. As has been pointed out, the stories in The Left Bank (1927) are mainly vignettes based on her experience in Paris, a couple go back to her Dominican childhood and ‘Vienne’ draws on an early period in her marriage to Jean Lenglet. The source of the plot of Quartet (1928) is her relationship with Ford Madox Ford while Lenglet was in prison for currency irregularities. The character of George Horsfield in After Leaving Mr Mackenzie (1930) appears to be based on her second husband, Leslie Tilden Smith, and Julia's relationship with her sister Norah draws on Rhys’ difficult relationship with her own sister Brenda. Voyage in the Dark (1934) is based on her affair with her first lover, Lancelot Grey Hugh Smith, and was first written as an autobiographical account some twenty-four years before it was published. The story of Sasha's marriage to Enno and the death of her baby son in Good Morning, Midnight (1939) draws once more on Rhys’ marriage to Lenglet. Even in Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) many of the details are drawn from her own Caribbean childhood. The short stories that appear in Tigers are Better Looking (1968) and in Sleep It Off Lady (1976) often use incidents in her life – ‘Let Them Call It Jazz’, for example, has the visit to Holloway, ‘Goodbye Marcus, Goodbye Rose’ an account of sexual molestation as a twelve-year-old, an experience which Coral Ann Howells and others have argued was a crucial determinant in Rhys’ psychological make-up. When she came to write her autobiography, Smile Please (published posthumously in 1979), she was anxious to avoid repeating incidents that she had already covered in her fiction, but in the end some appear. Anyone interested in parallels between Rhys’ life and fiction can consult Carole Angier's biography, where they are extensively documented.

I don't want to deny these parallels, though they are by no means exact, rather to shift the terms in which Rhys’ use of autobiography has been understood.

For a long time Jean Rhys’ fiction was seen in narrowly circumscribed terms: gifted, perhaps; of cultural significance, no; self-absorbed, emphatically so; well executed for a woman, but still women's fiction, with all that implied in limitation of scope and significance. Before the publication of Wide Sargasso Sea few readers noticed or commented on her Caribbean origins, so crucially important to her work in multiple ways: not always even then, although the novel is largely set in the West Indies, and refashions the story of the most famous fictional Creole woman, the first Mrs Rochester from Jane Eyre. Conversely, for decades the fact that her fiction had first appeared in the context of modernist writing was forgotten. That her fiction is often very funny, even if certainly tragicomedy rather than comedy, was ignored. Her books were most often read as highly personal accounts of an individual woman's unhappy lot. Like Sylvia Plath, Jean Rhys has suffered from having her life and work read against one another, fused into a myth of feminine distress. It is a myth which has obscured much of the significance and complexity of her writing.

To understand how that myth arose, and why her modernism was forgotten, one needs to go back to the history of her reception as a writer, and to the break between her early reputation and her later fame. There is no doubt that Ford Madox Ford, impresario to so many male writers of modernist fiction, considered her of their camp in his somewhat de haut en bas introduction to her first collection of stories, The Left Bank, published in 1927. He commended her admirable attention to the exemplary models for Anglo-Saxon modernist prose, Flaubert and Maupassant, and in particular praised with some surprise ‘the singular instinct for form possessed by this young lady, an instinct for form being possessed by singularly few writers of English and by almost no English women writers’ (LB 24–5). Most of those who reviewed her first four novels also identified her with the modern school, comparing her to the Imagist poets, to Hemingway, to Katherine Mansfield – though, unlike Ford, what tended to strike those early reviewers about her as a woman writer was not so much the excellence of her style as her obsession with the more disagreeable aspects of life and womanhood.

Jean Rhys had some anxieties over whether the significance of this reference would be understood: she wrote to Selma Vaz Dias in 1953, when she sent her an early version of this story:

Fort comme la mort is unusual in Maupassant's oeuvre in having as its subject an artist working in Paris. Rhys’ experience of France, where she lived for most of the twenties and first began writing for publication, and of French writers, in particular the premodernists like Flaubert, Maupassant and Rimbaud, played a vital and emancipatory role in her development. According to Carole Angier, she began each of her first four novels in Paris. France and French writers were of crucial importance to early Anglo-Saxon modernism, particularly on the eve of the First World War, but Rhys’ response to French artistic culture was particularly long-lasting and intense. By the end of twenties, Pound was more interested in Confucius, and Eliot in Christianity. Many of the expatriates living in Paris in the twenties and thirties had little contact with the French or (and here Ford was certainly an exception) interest in French writers. Rhys had a very different view of her years in France from Shari Benstock's dire picture of her outcast wanderings: she had no regrets about being an ‘outsider among outsiders’ in the expatriate community. Even if she was in the thirteenth arrondissement because she couldn't afford the Faubourg St Germain, she preferred the Parisian half-world to that of the expatriates. In 1964, she wrote to Diana Athill about a book she had read on Paris in the twenties by someone ‘not an Englishman’: