There are two explanations for Jean Rhys's extraordinary obscurity. One is simply the life she lived. (p. 28)

As a literary life it was, one may say, unusual; and it separated her entirely from the centers of literary power, where reputations and careers are made.

The other explanation has to do with her motive for writing. Surely no other modern novelist has been so completely without literary ambition…. "I never wanted to write at all," she said in one interview, "but of course I did discover that if you write you can forget, and so I did it again and again," and in another, "I wrote because it relieved me." This may sound a bit self-dramatizing, but I think it was true—she was one writer who wrote out of private necessity, to exorcise her demons.

One has a strong (and natural) impulse to read her novels simply as...