SOURCE: "The World of Jean Rhys's Short Stories," in World Literature Written in English, Vol. 18, No. 1, April, 1979, pp. 235-44.

In the following essay, Morrell examines Rhys's world view as presented in four short stories that span her career.

Jean Rhys's world, as seen in her three volumes of short stories, is a unified one. In every story a central consciousness, whether narrator, implied narrator, or protagonist, perceives and responds to reality in essentially the same terms. Rhys has said of her work: "I start to write about something that has happened or is happening to me, but somehow or other things start changing." One might argue that thus is all fiction forged. But in Rhys's work, the autobiographical beginnings are responsible for this central consciousness which we may take to be Rhys's own; the other things that "start changing" are her patternings of experience into a coherent world-view...