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Jean Rhys was born Ella Gwendoline Rees Williams in Dominica in 1890 and sailed for England at sixteen. She toured as a chorus girl, lived in Paris in the 1920s, and was given her pen name by Ford Madox Ford, who wrote the preface to her first book. Between 1928 and 1939 she published four novels about women alone in cheap rooms in Paris and London. Then she disappeared from view for almost thirty years, until an actress placed an advertisement in the New Statesman asking where she was. Wide Sargasso Sea came out in 1966, when she was seventy-six. This guide covers her nine key books, in order, and where to begin.
By Lisanne Swart · 9 key books · 1927–1979 · Updated October 2026
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Quick answer
Jean Rhys wrote five novels, three short-story collections and an unfinished autobiography. The best known is Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), her prequel to Jane Eyre; the others are Quartet (1928), After Leaving Mr Mackenzie (1931), Voyage in the Dark (1934) and Good Morning, Midnight (1939). Start with Wide Sargasso Sea, then go back to the 1930s novels, which tell much the same life from the inside.
Where to Start with Jean Rhys
If you want her defining book
→ Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) — the first Mrs Rochester’s story, from Jamaica to the attic.
If you want her Paris novels at their strongest
→ Good Morning, Midnight (1939) — a woman back in Paris, drinking, in 1939.
If you want the book closest to her own life
→ Voyage in the Dark (1934) — a girl from the Caribbean in Edwardian England.
If you want to try her in short form
→ Tigers Are Better-Looking (1968) — including “Let Them Call It Jazz”.
9 Jean Rhys Books, in Order
The Left Bank and Other Stories
Her first book: short sketches of the expatriate and down-at-heel Paris of the 1920s, published with a preface by Ford Madox Ford, who praised her “singular instinct for form”. A selection from it was reprinted in 1968 with Tigers Are Better-Looking.
Quartet
First published in 1928 as Postures, and as Quartet in the United States the following year. When her husband Stephan is jailed, Marya Zelli is taken in by an English couple, H. J. and Lois Heidler, and becomes H. J.’s mistress while his wife looks on. It is a fictional version of Rhys’s own affair with Ford Madox Ford. James Ivory filmed it in 1981 with Isabelle Adjani, Alan Bates and Maggie Smith; Adjani won Best Actress at Cannes.
After Leaving Mr Mackenzie
Julia Martin, thirty-six, lives in a cheap hotel on the Quai des Grands-Augustins until her former lover, Mr Mackenzie, stops her allowance. She goes to London, quarrels with her sister at their mother’s funeral, borrows from old lovers and returns to Paris with less than before. Rebecca West called it “terrible, but it is superb.”
Voyage in the Dark
Her third published novel but the first she wrote, and the most autobiographical. Anna Morgan has come to England from the West Indies after her father’s death and tours as a chorus girl; an affair with an older man ends, and she drifts. Her memories of the Caribbean run underneath the cold English present.
Good Morning, Midnight
Sasha Jansen, a middle-aged Englishwoman, returns to Paris after a long absence on money lent by a friend. She drinks, takes sleeping pills, worries about her looks and keeps coming back to her failed marriage and the death of her child. The title comes from Emily Dickinson. It sold poorly, and Rhys disappeared from public view for about a decade.
Wide Sargasso Sea
A prequel to Jane Eyre, told largely by Antoinette Cosway, the Creole heiress Rochester renames Bertha and locks in the attic at Thornfield. It moves from a decaying estate in Jamaica after emancipation, to a honeymoon in Dominica that turns to suspicion, to England and fire. Her editor Diana Athill brought it out at André Deutsch; it has been filmed (1993), made for television with Rebecca Hall (2006) and adapted for opera and radio.
Tigers Are Better-Looking
New stories published after the success of Wide Sargasso Sea, together with a selection from The Left Bank. It includes “Let Them Call It Jazz”, in which a woman from the West Indies, Selina, is sent to Holloway prison in London.
Sleep It Off Lady
Her last collection, published when she was in her eighties. The stories run roughly in the order of her life, from a childhood in Dominica to old age in an English village.
Smile Please
The autobiography she was working on when she died in May 1979, published later that year. The finished part covers her childhood in Dominica in detail; the later years are left in shorter, unfinished sections.
In What Order to Read Jean Rhys
The four 1930s novels can be read as one long story told at different ages: Anna Morgan in Voyage in the Dark is the youngest heroine, then Marya in Quartet, Julia in After Leaving Mr Mackenzie and Sasha in Good Morning, Midnight. Reading them in that order, rather than by publication date, follows the same kind of woman from girlhood to middle age.
Wide Sargasso Sea stands apart and works without the others, though it helps to know Jane Eyre. Leave Smile Please until last: it shows how much of the fiction came from her own life.
A reading path
1. Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)
2. Voyage in the Dark (1934)
3. Quartet (1928)
4. After Leaving Mr Mackenzie (1931)
5. Good Morning, Midnight (1939)
6. Smile Please (1979)
Everything Else Jean Rhys Published
Beyond the 9 key books: 4 more, grouped by kind.
Open a group with the + to see every book in it.
Shorter works and posthumous collections
4
4 books · 1975–1987
- 1975My Daythree short pieces
- 1985Tales of the Wide Caribbeanher stories set in the Caribbean
- 1985The Complete Novelsthe five novels in one volume
- 1987The Collected Short Storiesall three collections together
The years · 1890–1979
Quick facts about Jean Rhys
- Known for
- She is known for writing about women living alone, on little money and at the mercy of men, in Paris and London between the wars, and for giving the first Mrs Rochester of Jane Eyre her own story.
- 1890
- Born in Roseau, Dominica
- 1907
- Sails for England, aged sixteen
- 1928
- Quartet
- 1979
- Dies in Exeter, aged 88
- Born
- 24 August 1890, Roseau, Dominica, to a Welsh doctor and a Creole mother
- Real name
- Ella Williams; Ford Madox Ford suggested the name Jean Rhys
- Education
- The Perse School, Cambridge (1907–08), then the Academy of Dramatic Art (1909)
- Married
- Jean Lenglet (1919), Leslie Tilden-Smith (1934), Max Hamer (1947)
- Honours
- WH Smith Literary Award (1967); CBE (1978)
- Died
- 14 May 1979, Exeter; she had lived in Cheriton Fitzpaine, Devon, since 1960
The red mark is 1966: Wide Sargasso Sea, published twenty-seven years after her previous novel.
How Jean Rhys Writes: Small Rooms, Short Sentences
Rhys wrote from her own life and said so. “I can’t make things up. I can’t invent,” she told David Plante. Her heroines are versions of her at different ages: a chorus girl from the Caribbean, a kept woman in Paris, a drinker in a hotel room. In the Paris Review she said she had never written when she was happy.
The prose is plain and clipped, built from short sentences, dialogue and the heroine’s passing thoughts, with long gaps where another novelist would explain. Money is always counted: what a room costs, what a lover has sent, how long it will last. The plots turn less on events than on an allowance ending or a letter with ten pounds in it.
Wide Sargasso Sea keeps the method but changes the scale. It takes a minor character from Jane Eyre, gives her a past in the Caribbean Rhys grew up in, and lets Rochester narrate part of the book himself, so readers see the marriage fail from both sides.
Frequently asked questions about Jean Rhys’s books
How many books has Jean Rhys written?
Nine key books, all on this page: five novels, three short-story collections and the unfinished autobiography Smile Please (1979). Beside them are a short 1975 booklet, My Day, and collections put together after her death.
What are Jean Rhys’s books in order?
The Left Bank and Other Stories (1927), Quartet (1928), After Leaving Mr Mackenzie (1931), Voyage in the Dark (1934), Good Morning, Midnight (1939), Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Tigers Are Better-Looking (1968), Sleep It Off Lady (1976) and Smile Please (1979).
Where should I start with Jean Rhys?
Wide Sargasso Sea: it is short, it stands on its own, and it is the book most readers know her by. If you prefer the interwar novels, start with Good Morning, Midnight.
What is Jean Rhys’s most famous book?
Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), the story of Antoinette Cosway, the first wife of Mr Rochester in Jane Eyre. It won the WH Smith Literary Award in 1967 and was No. 53 on BBC Culture’s 2015 list of the 100 greatest British novels.
Do you need to read Jane Eyre before Wide Sargasso Sea?
No, but it helps. The novel ends where Charlotte Brontë’s begins, with Antoinette, now called Bertha, locked in the attic at Thornfield Hall, and the final pages assume you know what happens to the house.
Is Quartet about Ford Madox Ford?
It is based on Rhys’s affair with him in Paris in the 1920s. Ford had become her mentor, published her and suggested her pen name; in the novel he becomes H. J. Heidler, and Rhys becomes Marya Zelli.
Have Jean Rhys’s books been filmed?
Yes. James Ivory filmed Quartet in 1981, with Isabelle Adjani, Alan Bates and Maggie Smith. Wide Sargasso Sea was filmed in 1993, directed by John Duigan, and again for television in 2006 with Rebecca Hall; there have also been an opera and several BBC radio versions.
Why did Jean Rhys stop publishing between 1939 and 1966?
Good Morning, Midnight sold poorly and she fell out of sight, living in poverty in England. In 1949 the actress Selma Vaz Dias advertised in the New Statesman for her, hoping to adapt Good Morning, Midnight for radio. The contact, and a BBC broadcast in 1957, led to Wide Sargasso Sea.
Is Wide Sargasso Sea Caribbean literature?
It has been debated. In Contradictory Omens (1974) the Barbadian poet and historian Kamau Brathwaite argued that white Creoles had “forfeited their claim to the spiritual life of the Caribbean”, which put the novel’s place in the Caribbean canon in question; critics such as Peter Hulme disagreed. Rhys was the daughter of a white Creole family whose ancestors had owned plantations and enslaved people.
Was Jean Rhys a feminist writer?
She did not call herself one, and critics still disagree. Her own generation found her novels sordid; feminist critics later took them up, while others have called her work anti-feminist.
Footnotes
- Jean Rhys — Wikipedia
- Wide Sargasso Sea — Wikipedia
- Jean Rhys, The Art of Fiction No. 64 — The Paris Review, 1979
- Jean Rhys — Encyclopaedia Britannica
- Quartet (1981 film) — Wikipedia
- Recrossing the Sargasso Sea: Brathwaite and his critics — ARIEL
Bibliography last verified 9 October 2026. Where sources give different first-publication years, this page uses the year in library catalogues or the publisher’s own record.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and the books are all his.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“I found when I was a child that if I could put the hurt into words, it would go.”
— Jean Rhys, interviewed by Elizabeth Vreeland, The Paris Review, The Art of Fiction No. 64 (1979)
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