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“... Sylvie and Bruno stories, taking in works by Michelangelo, Col-eridge, Hogg, Stevenson, Kafka, Jean Rhys and numerous others. It is a short book, but dense. Warner’s highly complex line of argument, winding around so much material, and so tightly, produces a compacted, even crabbed architecture. You feel like you’ve stepped inside a miniaturised ...”

“... within her chosen genre. Davey’s work is also allied to the tradition of novelists like Jean Rhys, Barbara Pym or Anita Brookner, who quietly insist on the persistence of alienation, domestic or otherwise, in women’s lives. Breakdowns in communication between the sexes punctuate her dialogue. ‘She could see him thinking she was an odd girl ...”

“... his reading as soon as he starts to write. His fiction has the same freakish certitude as that of Jean Rhys, Flannery O’Connor and Christina Stead. Pritchett’s curious inwardness when writing about women has often been noticed: ‘No,’ he said and told her what he had told her a dozen times before. She liked her flat to have someone else’s voice ...”

“... question about a genre or a tradition you see yourself in. In 1966 when you started A Humument, Jean Rhys published A Wide Sargasso Sea.TP: A connection.GP: Are you like Jean Rhys, rewriting a Victorian novel? Is that a tradition you’re in?TP: That’s a horrible book anyway. It’s a remake.GP: But is your ...”

“... When​ Jean Stafford published Boston Adventure in 1944, at the age of 29, Life magazine called her ‘the most brilliant of new fiction writers’. The novel sold an impressive 380,000 copies and she went on to publish two more, The Mountain Lion (1947) and The Catherine Wheel (1952). Throughout the 1950s, her short stories were a fixture in the New Yorker ...”

“... London demi-monde before the Second World War, but for their literary depiction he has to go to Jean Rhys. Rhys said in her 1979 autobiography, Smile Please, that she ‘used to long so fiercely to be black’. This and her nostalgia for her Caribbean birthplace are enough for Sandhu: ‘Her racial background and her ...”

“... worker manipulating the robot on the shop floor, every salesman in his dark suit, every jean-clad punk on his motorcycle, and every dedicated Marxist, has read some chapters of The Tale of Genji (and of the Pillow Book of the same period). Many of the residents of one of the noisiest capital cities in the world, living under an often ...”

“... best book to date is Difficult Women, an unflattering account of his friendship with Sonia Orwell, Jean Rhys and Germaine Greer. He won’t be winning first prize for dignity, but he tells it pretty much like it was – and like he was, you imagine. But discretion is never his first instinct. As for Stephen himself, I sometimes wonder if he wants me to ...”

“... referred to simply by her surname, tout court. Woolf hasn’t made it, even after all these years; Rhys without the Jean is incognito; Nin without the Anais looks like a typo. Colette, Madame Colette, remains, in this as much else, unique. Colette did not acquire this distinction because she terrorised respect language out ...”

“... drown themselves in chains. Bohemians of a dedicated ferocity that make the behaviour of Jean Rhys and her companions, so deplored by John Bayley recently in these pages, look like the Teddy Bears’ Picnic. Oh! That Imar O’Hagan, with his trained snails and his ‘fridge full of blocks of frozen vampire bats “like an airline breakfast of ...”

“... seriousness with which he encouraged new writers to reviving the careers of older ones – such as Jean Rhys – and restoring writers consigned by accident or conspiracy to semi-oblivion – the novelist Valéry Larbaud, ‘the poet of first-class travel’, and the Russian short story writer Ivan Bunin. Bunin could evoke the transient but potent ...”

“... I was before the war,’ she wrote in 1979. ‘Perhaps if I took to the bottle like poor Jean Rhys . . . it would help.’ In the end, for all her anti-feminism, it was the sisters who saved her. Carmen Callil’s newly founded publishing house, Virago, managed to wrest her work from Collins and relaunched her as a Modern Classic. Lehmann, a ...”

“... turn up with small, delightful gifts to hearten the cheerless. She took on the even more difficult Jean Rhys in her old age and put up with no end of fuss and fume from her, recognising perhaps another talented beauty grown old and enraged. Plante found her refusal to talk about his deeper self painful. ‘I wonder,’ he asks her at lunch when she is ...”

“... As with James, iron discipline was none the less the order of the day; the dismal bohemianism of a Jean Rhys would have been unthinkable to Bowen, who also hated sex being treated at all physically: both novels and stories are rich with her own kind of respectability. As distinctions and divisions crumbled in her imagination, her style took on an ever ...”

“... yet, but turned out to belong to other adventurers and colonials, to Christina Stead, or Jean Rhys. This passage, for instance, is surely a first draft for Good Morning, Midnight: Thank God! the steps have gone past my door. In the mirror she saw again that strange watchful creature who had been her companion on the journey, that woman with ...”