SOURCE: Thomas, Sue. “An Antillean Voice.” In The Worldling of Jean Rhys, pp. 49-65. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999.

In the following essay, Thomas places Rhys's Antillean narrative voice in The Left Bank and Other Stories within the context of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Dominican travel writing and the judges the effect of gender, class, ethnic, and racial stereotypes on Rhys and the reception of her short stories.

In the preface to The Left Bank and Other Stories (1927), Jean Rhys's first book of fiction, Ford Madox Ford praises “the singular instinct for form possessed by this young lady,” a quality “possessed by singularly few writers of English and by almost no English women writers” (25). He represents her origins as Antillean and her aesthetic tastes as French, rather than Anglo-Saxon, having been formed by “the almost exclusive reading of French writers of a recent, but not the most recent, date...