Neglected and forgotten for many years, the arresting, elliptical novels written by the Domenican-born Jean Rhys are now widely acclaimed. Her last and most famous novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, her retelling of Jane Eyre, is a central text for the imaginative re-examination of gender and colonial power relations. Helen Carrs account draws on both recent feminist and post-colonial theory, and places Rhyss work in relation to modernist and postmodernist writing. Whilst all Rhyss novels are autobiographical, it is a mistake, Carr argues, to see them simply in individual terms: Rhys uses the material of her own life to structure a devastating critique of the greed and cruelty of the Establishment world, both of Europe and of Empire. This new edition considers the growing body of critical appreciation of Jean Rhys.