SOURCE: Gregg, Veronica Marie. “The 1840s to the 1900s: The Creole and the Postslavery West Indies.” In Jean Rhys's Historical Imagination: Reading and Writing the Creole, pp. 135-43. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1995.

In the following excerpt, Gregg offers thematic analyses of two of Rhys's West Indian stories: “Again the Antilles” and “Fishy Waters.”

“again the Antilles”

“Again the Antilles,” first published in 1927, is also grounded in the specific political and historical context of postslavery Dominica. The short story covers the period from the 1830s to the 1900s. Dominican politics and culture provide the locus of an imaginative exploration of the interconnectedness of imperial/colonial politics, history, narrative, and the acts of reading and writing. For purposes of clarity and comparison, I shall first cite in chronological order some of the specific historical events of the period as recorded in accounts by historian Joseph Borome...