SOURCE: "Of Heroines and Victims: Jean Rhys and Jane Eyre," in Massachusetts Review, Vol. XVII, No. 3, Autumn, 1976, pp. 540-52.

In the following essay, Porter examines Rhys's portrayal of alienated and dispossessed female protagonists and the interrelationship of Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre.

Between 1927 and 1939 Jean Rhys published four novels and a collection of short stories. The novels all have in common a central figure who is an alienated woman and a modern setting, chiefly the years between the two world wars in Paris and London. Whether or not they are actually written in the first person, they adopt the point of view of their solitary heroines, of women who are more or less attractive and more or less mature, but who remain enigmatic and remote. Dependent on but invariably abandoned by men, they seem obscurely destined to drift from man to man and from one dingy hotel...