SOURCE: Lonsdale, Thorunn. “Literary Foremother: Jean Rhys's ‘Sleep It Off, Lady’ and Two Jamaican Poems.” In Telling Stories: Postcolonial Short Fiction in English, edited by Jacqueline Bardolph, pp. 145-54. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001.

In the following essay, Lonsdale analyzes the reference to Rhys's “Sleep It Off, Lady” in Olive Senior's poem “Meditation on Red” and Lorna Goodison's poem “Lullaby for Jean Rhys.”

Jean Rhys's influence as a literary foremother is acknowledged through intertextual links made by the Jamaican poets Olive Senior and Lorna Goodison in their poems “Meditation on Red” and “Lullaby for Jean Rhys” respectively. Senior and Goodison make reference to a specific, and hitherto critically neglected, short story by Rhys, “Sleep It Off, Lady,”¹ one that has distinct autobiographical resonance. Furthermore, in making the association with a short story which gives its name to the title of the collection in which it appears, both poets simultaneously invoke the...