Reading List

Authors Like Jean Rhys

Ella Gwendoline Rees Williams was born in Dominica in 1890 and sent to England at sixteen. She toured small towns as a chorus girl under names like Vivienne and Ella Gray, and in Paris in 1924 Ford Madox Ford, her mentor and lover, suggested she call herself Jean Rhys. Four novels about women drifting through rented rooms followed, ending with Good Morning, Midnight in 1939. Then she vanished from view, until in 1949 the actress Selma Vaz Dias placed an advertisement in the New Statesman to find her. Wide Sargasso Sea, her life of the first Mrs Rochester from Jane Eyre, came out in 1966, when she was 76, and won the WH Smith Literary Award. The ten writers below share her ground: women on the edge of money and love, the cities that ignore them, and the colonial past that follows them.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Modernist fiction · Caribbean · Women adrift · Updated October 2026

Quick answer

If you love Jean Rhys, start with Jamaica Kincaid, whose Lucy (1990) follows a young Caribbean woman alone in a cold northern city. For the novel Wide Sargasso Sea answers, read Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), and for a colonial girlhood and a lover remembered, Marguerite Duras’s The Lover (1984). Further down is a novel about Rhys herself by a Caribbean-born writer.

10 authors like Jean Rhys

01
The novel she answered

Charlotte Brontë

English · Jane Eyre (1847), Villette (1853)

Brontë (1816–1855) grew up at Haworth parsonage in Yorkshire and published Jane Eyre under the name Currer Bell. In it, Mr Rochester’s first wife, Bertha Mason, a Creole heiress from Jamaica, is kept locked in the attic of Thornfield Hall. Villette follows a lonely Englishwoman teaching in a Belgian city.

Wide Sargasso Sea cannot be fully read without it: Rhys takes the madwoman in the attic and gives her a childhood, a name and a reason. Read Villette too, for a heroine as isolated as any of Rhys’s.

— Lisanne

Every book by Charlotte Brontë →

02
Her mentor and lover

Ford Madox Ford

English · The Good Soldier (1915), Parade’s End (1924–1928)

Ford (1873–1939) was a novelist and editor who championed young writers in Paris in the 1920s. He wrote the preface to Rhys’s first book, The Left Bank and Other Stories (1927), and their affair is the basis of her novel Quartet. The Good Soldier is narrated by a man slowly realising how little he understood his own marriage.

The other side of Quartet: the older literary man who shaped her. The Good Soldier shares her interest in unreliable feeling and what respectable people hide, and it is short.

— Lisanne
03
A colonial in London

Katherine Mansfield

New Zealander · Bliss (1920), The Garden Party (1922)

Mansfield (1888–1923) was born in Wellington, New Zealand, and settled in England as a young woman. She wrote short stories of sharp, quiet moments and died at Fontainebleau in France at 34. Some biographers have accused her of plagiarising Chekhov in one of her early stories.

Another woman from the edge of the empire making her life in London, in the same years, and another master of the short form who writes loneliness without self-pity. Mansfield is lighter and more lyrical; Rhys is starker.

— Lisanne

Every book by Katherine Mansfield →

04
A woman under a new name

Anna Kavan

British · Asylum Piece (1940), Ice (1967)

Kavan (1901–1968) was born Helen Woods in Cannes and published her early novels as Helen Ferguson, her married name. In 1939 she became Anna Kavan, the name of the heroine of her own 1930 novel Let Me Alone, both as a writer and legally. She spent periods in clinics and sanatoriums and was addicted to heroin for most of her adult life. Ice, a novel of a man pursuing a girl across a freezing world, appeared a year after Wide Sargasso Sea.

Kavan shares Rhys’s renamed self, her breakdowns and her late rediscovery, and writes the same dread of being at the mercy of other people. Asylum Piece is the closest match to the Rhys of the 1930s.

— Lisanne
05
A colonial girlhood

Marguerite Duras

French · The Sea Wall (1950), Moderato Cantabile (1958), The Lover (1984)

Duras (1914–1996) was born in French Indochina; her father died when she was seven, and her mother lost money on unfarmable rice land, a story told in The Sea Wall. The Lover, about a French teenager and her older Chinese lover in Saigon, won the Prix Goncourt in 1984. She also wrote the screenplay for Hiroshima mon amour (1959).

The nearest European match: a white girl from a declining colonial family, a lover with money, and a style stripped to the bone. The Lover pairs with Rhys’s Dominica writing and Voyage in the Dark.

— Lisanne

Every book by Marguerite Duras →

06
Girls who leave

Edna O’Brien

Irish · The Country Girls (1960), Girl (2019)

O’Brien was born in Tuamgraney, County Clare, in 1930 and moved to London in 1954. The Country Girls, about two young women leaving a convent school for Dublin, was banned in Ireland, and copies were burned, for its frankness about sex. She was still publishing novels in her late eighties.

O’Brien writes the young woman from a small, strict place loose in the city with men and no money, as Rhys did in Voyage in the Dark, but with more appetite and less fatalism. Start with The Country Girls.

— Lisanne
07
From the Caribbean, angrily

Jamaica Kincaid

Antiguan-American · Annie John (1985), A Small Place (1988), Lucy (1990)

Kincaid was born Elaine Potter Richardson in St John’s, Antigua, in 1949, and at 16 was sent by her mother to a suburb of New York to work as an au pair. Annie John is a girlhood in Antigua; Lucy is a young woman from the West Indies working as an au pair for a North American family; A Small Place is a furious short book on tourism and the legacy of British rule in Antigua.

The closest writer to Rhys on the subject of a Caribbean girl sent north. Kincaid writes from the other side of Rhys’s colonial history, as a Black Antiguan, and she is angrier where Rhys is numb.

— Lisanne
08
Loneliness, precisely

Anita Brookner

English · A Start in Life (1981), Hotel du Lac (1984)

Brookner (1928–2016) was an art historian at the Courtauld Institute and the first woman to be Slade Professor of Fine Art at Cambridge. She published her first novel at 53. Hotel du Lac, about a romantic novelist sent to a Swiss hotel after a scandal, won the Booker Prize in 1984.

Brookner writes the same woman as Good Morning, Midnight, alone in hotels and rented rooms and watching the couples, but from the respectable middle class rather than the edge of it. Quieter, wittier and just as sad.

— Lisanne

Every book by Anita Brookner →

09
Rhys, reimagined

Caryl Phillips

Kittitian-British · Crossing the River (1993), A Distant Shore (2003), A View of the Empire at Sunset (2018)

Phillips was born in St Kitts in 1958 and brought to Leeds at four months old. Crossing the River, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, follows the descendants of an African father who sold his children into slavery. A View of the Empire at Sunset is a novel about Rhys’s own life, from Dominica to England and back.

The writer who complicates her. Phillips sets Rhys’s private unhappiness inside the history of empire and plantation that produced her family, which is where her more critical readers have also put it. Read it after the novels.

— Lisanne
10
Good Morning, Midnight now

Ottessa Moshfegh

American · Eileen (2015), My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018), Lapvona (2022)

Moshfegh was born in Boston in 1981. Eileen was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize. My Year of Rest and Relaxation follows a young art history graduate in New York from June 2000 who quits her job and tries to sleep for a year with pills from a questionable psychiatrist.

The modern heir to Good Morning, Midnight: a woman who has given up on the world, alone in a room, narrating her withdrawal with black humour. Moshfegh is more satirical; the sense of a life stalled is the same.

— Lisanne

Every book by Ottessa Moshfegh →

Where to start if you loved Jean Rhys

If you loved Wide Sargasso Sea, read Charlotte Brontë.

Jane Eyre (1847): the novel it answers, with Bertha Mason in the attic.

If you loved Good Morning, Midnight, read Anita Brookner.

Hotel du Lac (1984): a woman alone in a hotel, watching everyone else.

If you loved Voyage in the Dark, read Jamaica Kincaid.

Lucy (1990): a young woman from the West Indies, alone in a northern city.

If you loved Quartet, read Ford Madox Ford.

The Good Soldier (1915): a marriage seen too late, by Rhys’s own mentor.

If you want more Rhys, read Voyage in the Dark next.

Her 1934 novel about a chorus girl from the Caribbean in London. Then Smile Please (1979), the unfinished autobiography published after her death.

Frequently asked questions about authors like Jean Rhys

Who writes like Jean Rhys?

Jamaica Kincaid, Anita Brookner and Marguerite Duras are the closest. Kincaid writes a Caribbean girl sent north, Brookner a woman alone in hotels, and Duras a colonial girlhood and a lover with money.

What should I read after Wide Sargasso Sea?

Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), if you have not read it, and Caryl Phillips’s A View of the Empire at Sunset (2018), a novel about Rhys’s own life.

What should I read after Good Morning, Midnight?

Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac (1984) and Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018), both about women who have withdrawn from the world.

Is Jean Rhys like Katherine Mansfield?

Both came to London from the edge of the empire, Rhys from Dominica and Mansfield from New Zealand, and both write loneliness in short, exact scenes. Mansfield is lighter and more lyrical; Rhys is starker.

Is there a new book by or about Jean Rhys?

No new title has been announced as of October 2026. The most recent major biography is Miranda Seymour’s I Used to Live Here Once: The Haunted Life of Jean Rhys (2022).

Which Jean Rhys book should I read first?

Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) is the best known. For the Rhys of the 1930s, start with Good Morning, Midnight (1939).

Sources

List last reviewed 31 October 2026.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Every comparison here is a judgement about method and subject, not an algorithmic match. See more on her personal bookshelf.

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