Jean Rhys and her unlikeable female protagonists are dangerous and difficult to place; they defy our popular notions of relatable or likeable. It is therefore no surprise that Rhys has rarely been adapted for the screen. As Erica L. Johnson and Patricia Moran note in one of the few recent scholarly books devoted to Rhys, she is associated with global modernisms and cosmopolitanism, ‘a philosophy that her characters are seen to both embody and reject’ (2015: 6). This is one aspect that makes Rhys a writer whose work deserves to be read, adapted, seen and studied today. Although her work continues to evoke strong responses in readers, scholarly work on Rhys is sporadic. Adaptations can bring the work of neglected authors to the attention of new readers (both casual and scholarly), particularly when, as Jim Collins has noted, ‘the literary adaptation exists in a dialogic relationship not just to the source novel but to a host of best-selling opera recordings, travel books, shelter magazines, and even cookbooks’ (2010: 133). However, existing screen adaptations of Rhys do not lend themselves to this, nor are these adaptations particularly intertextual, in spite of Wide Sargasso Sea's widely noted connection to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. This chapter will explore the failings of two of the existing adaptations: Quartet (1981) and Wide Sargasso Sea (2006), and suggest that there is now a greater appetite to see Rhys's difficult women on screen.

Elaine Savoury writes that ‘both the plot and visual intensity of Rhys's writing lend themselves to the cinematic’ (Savoury 2009: 43). Yet there has been a reluctance to adapt Rhys for the screen, in spite of her appeal to readers: ‘readers embrace Rhys's strangeness and indeed, she inspires an almost cult-like following’ (Johnson and Moran 2015: 8).