SOURCE: Tiffin, Helen. “Rite of Reply: The Shorter Fictions of Jean Rhys.” In Re-Siting Queen's English: Text and Tradition in Post-Colonial Literatures, edited by Gillian Whitlock and Helen Tiffin, pp. 67-78. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1992.

In the following essay, Tiffin asserts that a few of Rhys's short stories—“Again the Antilles,” “The Day They Burned the Books,” and “Rapunzel, Rapunzel”—enact the recuperative strategies found in her novel Wide Sargasso Sea.

The ascription of the genesis of Wide Sargasso Sea to Jean Rhys's desire to recuperate Rochester's mad Creole wife from Charlotte Brontë's “imprisonment” of her in Jane Eyre has increasingly become a critical commonplace, and discussions of the relationship between the two often begin at this point:

The mad wife in Jane Eyre always interested me. I was convinced that Charlotte Brontë must have had something against the West Indies, and I was angry about it. Otherwise why...