The year 2016 was the 50th anniversary of the publication of Jean Rhys’s last novel, Wide Sargasso Sea. It used to be said that 50 years was the right length for copyright to persist, and that reputations of artists and their work were unstable for at least half a century, before assessment found its balance. This collection implicitly argues that 50 years after publication is a good moment to pause and reconsider a work still vibrantly alive for a new generation of readers.

We began this project after presentations given at two symposia in 2016 to celebrate the novel’s special birthday. From the response of Rhys scholars, established and new, as well as fiction writers and visual artists, it was clear that there is more to say about this now canonical, highly influential text. This collection explores how a diverse group of readers interpreted it in this moment, almost two decades into another new century, and found highly significant new ways to think about it.

The two symposia took place in March and October 2016. The first was hosted by Goldsmiths, University of London, organized by Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert and Peter Hulme, both eminent names in postcolonial/Caribbean literature circles. Paravisini-Gebert’s biography of Rhys’s contemporary, Phyllis Shand Allfrey, and Peter Hulme’s work on Amerindian cultural presence in Dominica, Rhys’s homeland, are of great importance in understanding Rhys’s work. The two-day symposium presented reconsiderations of the novel in times very different from 1966, marking not only the evolution of approaches by established critics, but the first steps of new Rhys scholars engaged in doctoral work. Known Rhys scholars such as Judith Raiskin (who edited the critical edition of the Norton Wide Sargasso Sea), Denise Decaires-Narain, and Helen Carr were not able to contribute to this collection, but made important interventions in London.

The second symposium was hosted by the New School University, New York, in October 2016, organized by Elaine Savory. This was a one-day event, with presentations by academic critics, creative writers, and a visual artist, proof that Wide Sargasso Sea inspires people in a range of disciplines, not only literary critics and theorists. The only presenter not included here is the novelist Robert Antoni: his conversation with Caryl Phillips about their respect for Rhys’s work was a powerful conclusion to that day.

A third event should be mentioned because it marks the distance Rhys has come from being regarded as only a British writer to being included in the canon of Anglophone Caribbean literature. The BIMFEST (the biannual literary festival held in Barbados and named after the famous journal Bim) included Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea in a retrospective reevaluation of roughly half a century of now-canonical Anglophone Caribbean literature. This affirmed that Rhys cannot be responsibly considered without the Caribbean context which shaped her so profoundly for the first 16 years of her life. We can trace this approach back through the work of the founding editor of Wasafiri, Shusheila Nasta, who attended the London symposium and who published two important clusters of sociopolitical responses to the novel (1995, 1998). These included Kamau Brathwaite’s naming of Rhys as the “Helen of Our Wars,” a term that evokes just how significantly she figured into the conversation about Caribbean literature, wherever critics came down on the issue.

Reception of the novel in and since 1966 has often been said to reflect three main approaches. In no intended order, these are feminist/gender, postcolonial/Caribbean, and modernist. Wide Sargasso Sea appeared in a moment of cultural ferment, in which race, gender, and class issues were at the forefront, and the formal ending of British colonialism in the Caribbean was underway. This novel, representing the story of a white creole woman in the immediate aftermath of slavery, revisioning Jane Eyre, was bound to provoke political discussion, not just in the 1960s, but since. This may be the case in part because she was herself often thinking along with theoretical trends in her fiction; as Helen Carr so eloquently put it, in historicizing the reception of Wide Sargasso Sea at a conference on Rhys in Paris in 2018, “Rhys’s ideas quickened to more theoretical debates.”¹ Carr showed how, for example, Rhys was thinking through power in a mode and moment that resonated with Foucault’s theoretical work on the same topic. Looking back on the reception history of Wide Sargasso Sea makes it possible to see cultural and literary trends as they shaped particular approaches just as the readings in this volume shed light on such current issues as the #MeToo movement and its recognition of a global culture of sexual exploitation, the twenty-first-century concept of rape culture, climate change and environmental destruction, and even contemporary trends in fashion and design aesthetics. The novel speaks to all of these issues and more.

There have been a wide variety of insightful readings of the text over its 50-year history. Chronologically, the first phase of response to Rhys’s work focused on her modernist beginnings as a writer in Paris in the mid-1920s. Ford Madox Ford, her mentor, almost complained, because she ignored his advice, about the lack of contextual detail (topography) in her first collection of stories except for the Caribbean. He could be a very prolix writer himself and he found her concision to be extreme. Clearly Rhys’s instinct gave her a unique voice, just as Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein, and H.D. have particularly individual voices within what we call modernist literature. We also know now that modernism is not one movement, and it is not only European. For example, many point to the role of violence in modernist formations and tend to focus on the world wars as forces that changed consciousness, but while these European-centered wars were intensely murderous and cruel, we have to acknowledge that the transatlantic slave trade was the beginning of a brutal modernity and displacement for millions over centuries. Because Rhys’s work and Wide Sargasso Sea in particular are grounded in the Caribbean, this history haunts her poetics. As our perception of modernisms has evolved, so have readings of Rhys’s work.

Although Rhys began writing Wide Sargasso Sea during the period of high modernism, by the time of its publication in 1966 two important political movements were underway: European and U.S.-centered feminisms and demands for the end of formal colonialism in the Caribbean. The novel was not written for or to the 1960s, nor even in terms of evolution, in the 1960s, but it speaks to that moment of hope and determination for cultural and social change. There was a wide spectrum of feminist readings of it by critics of different ethnic backgrounds on both sides of the Atlantic and also from the Caribbean. It took a little longer to establish that Rhys is definitively a Caribbean writer because that had to be argued from deep knowledge of the region and she was claimed by Britain in mid-career. This is understandable in that Rhys was white creole and left the Caribbean as a teenager to live in Britain, then France and Britain again, only ever returning for a few weeks to Dominica in her middle 40s. In fact all her work displays either evidently or subtly, her Caribbean identity and affiliation, but it was Wide Sargasso Sea, even more than her somewhat autobiographical first novel Voyage in the Dark, which made facing this unavoidable. Thus, the novel has been a litmus paper for shifts in cultural consciousness in readers, and it is valuable to look at the reception history of Wide Sargasso Sea from this point of view. It is canonical because it is so well written that it can inspire diverse interpretations. In shaping this collection, we have found that critics and theorists who may have thought they were done with the text have found, in our moment now, 50 years on from the novel’s beginning in print, they have much more to say.

This might be so partly because Wide Sargasso Sea is such a highly determined, very precisely written, short text. Rhys worked on it for a number of decades, and clearly earlier texts, such as her lost draft novel, “The Revenant,” are ghost presences within the finished work. Novels which are baggy monsters, full of digressions and detail, are actually much harder to read from divergent perspectives than lean ones, in which many words carry metonymic significance. In fact, it is always most productive to read Rhys’s prose employing an awareness of the economies and layering of poetry. She had a lifelong deep attachment to poetry, especially in French, though she rarely wrote it herself, and when she did, she did not choose to work at it seriously: instead, she found some formal poetic strategies useful. The very concision of her prose invites the reader in to explore and speculate, because it excludes definitive, detailed representations.

She also is expert at indicating large historical events or moments via a small occurrence. For example, Mr. Mason has the idea of bringing in Indian labor to the plantation. In this moment, he represents the white male plantocracy, which did just that in reality in Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana. Aunt Cora, in her opposition to this idea, represents the canny insider who knows better. Moreover, Cora’s role in trying to help Antoinette illuminates the powerlessness of the white creole woman given into marriage with a foreign, colonialist stranger because her money attracts him. But then Rhys complicates these characters in ways which provide many alternative readings. Mason is a kindly stepfather to Antoinette, despite all of his troubles with her mother; Cora is in the end not just an affectionate and protective aunt but a scion of a past with slavery, which benefited her. It is easy (and true) to say this plurality of perspectives is quintessentially Caribbean, but it is also a key part of highly accomplished literary storytelling.

A word needs to be said about the wide range of inspiration which the novel has provided to many kinds of writers and artists, some of whom are included in this collection. Although, like much sensitive and well-written fiction, Wide Sargasso Sea has not translated well into film; two attempts have been made to do this (1993, directed by John Duigan for an Australian film company, and 2006, directed by Brendan Maher for the BBC). These films were not successful visions of the novel despite Rhys’s biographer Carole Angier providing screenplay input for the first film, and established writer Stephen Greenhorn screenwriting for the second. Making Rhys’s subtle visual representations literal almost inevitably condemns them to becoming lurid and falling into cultural clichés of race, sexuality, and gender, even to the extent of Caribbean foliage and topography (the tourist promotion of the region for jaded northerners looking for escape from reality does not help). Far more successfully, more than one play has sought to represent Rhys herself dramatically, for example in Barbados in the early 1980s, directed by Earl Warner, and in London in 2003 (the actor who played Rhys in London, Diana Quick, has contributed a chapter to this collection). For those pursuing careers in design—in our collection, a book cover designer and a fashion designer serve as examples—the novel appears to speak volumes in terms of suggesting ways of speaking important insights by means of line and color....