¶ … hero? Does it depend on whether one is a man or a woman? Is the nature of heroism engendered? Are there different categories of heroism - a heroism of the mind and a heroism of the body, for example? The life and work of the novelist Jean Rhys help us to understand the nature of the heroic. Rhys herself may be considered to be a hero even though her life was not by conventional means a success. Indeed, it might be considered to be a stereotypical failure: She drank heavily, had a number of unhappy love affairs, and seems to have lost her talent or at least her will to write for decades. But in the end. A woman who called herself a "doormat in a world of boots" proved by her life and in her work that doormats are durable indeed. Rhys's sense of herself as a certainly less-then-conventional-heroic presence is reflected in the descriptions she proffers of her characters, descriptions that seem essentially autobiographical, like this passage from After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie.

She found pleasure in memories, as an old woman might have done. Her mind was a confusion of memory and imagination. It was always places that she thought of, not people. She would lie thinking of the dark shadows of houses in a street white with sunshine; or trees with slender black branches and young green leaves, like the trees of a London square in spring; or of a dark-purple sea, the sea of a chromo or of some tropical country that she had never seen.

Born in the West Indies, and thus always to some extent a writer marked by the experience of belonging to a colonized place, her first novels were set not in her homeland but in the bohemian circles of Europe in the years between the world wars. After this early burst of creativity, she ceased to write altogether until she wrote what would prove in many ways to be her most successful novel,...

When she moved to Paris shortly afterward, she met the English novelist Ford Madox Ford who encouraged her to write - a striking point because she closely resembles in many ways the characters and particular kind of heroism embodied in Ford's most famous work, The Good Soldier. Rhys's first book of short stories, The Left Bank was published in 1927. Shortly after this and in quick succession she published several full-length novels: Postures (in 1928), After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (in 1931), Voyage in the Dark (in 1934), and Good Morning, Midnight (in 1939).
She spent the middle years of her life in Cornwall, a beautiful but relatively isolated and isolating part of England, and wrote nothing again until the 1966 Wide Sargasso Sea. This novel is strikingly postmodern for its time for it tells the life story of a fictional character in a strikingly self-referential and yet critical way. The novel examines the early years of Antoinette Cosway, who would become in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre the made first wife of Mr. Rochester's, the archetypal madwoman in the attic.

Bronte makes of this character something terrible, terrifying and certainly far less than fully human: When she is revealed to Jane in Chapter 26 of Jane Eyre we see her as possessed by her body, a beast tended over by a witchlike figure whose familiar she may well be.

He lifted the hangings from the wall, uncovering the second door: this, too, he opened. In a room without a window, there burnt a fire guarded by a high and strong fender, and a lamp suspended from the ceiling by a chain. Grace…