SOURCE: "Jean Rhys's Feminism: Theory Against Practice," in World Literature Written in English, Vol. 28, No. 2, Autumn, 1988, pp. 326-36.

In the following excerpt, De Abruña argues that Rhys's views, as demonstrated in her fiction, were anti-feminist.

Despite recent attempts by feminist critics to read all of her fiction as a portrait of oppressed women, Jean Rhys's "heroines" are unco-operatively anti-feminist. They dislike and fear other women, while hoping for love and security from men who, they anticipate, will finally reject them. Her women—Anna, Marya, Julia, Sasha, and Antoinette—expect, often fatalistically, that these relationships will fail; and their predictions become self-fulfilling prophecies that legitimize their fears and preserve them from responsibility. The only exception to this is Wide Sargasso Sea (and, to a lesser extent, Voyage in the Dark). . . .

Critics have considered Rhys a spokesperson for society's oppressed, a satirist of sexism, and a champion of all...