For a long time Jean Rhys’ fiction was seen in narrowly circumscribed terms: gifted, perhaps; of cultural significance, no; self-absorbed, emphatically so; well executed for a woman, but still women's fiction, with all that implied in limitation of scope and significance. Before the publication of Wide Sargasso Sea few readers noticed or commented on her Caribbean origins, so crucially important to her work in multiple ways: not always even then, although the novel is largely set in the West Indies, and refashions the story of the most famous fictional Creole woman, the first Mrs Rochester from Jane Eyre. Conversely, for decades the fact that her fiction had first appeared in the context of modernist writing was forgotten. That her fiction is often very funny, even if certainly tragicomedy rather than comedy, was ignored. Her books were most often read as highly personal accounts of an individual woman's unhappy lot. Like Sylvia Plath, Jean Rhys has suffered from having her life and work read against one another, fused into a myth of feminine distress. It is a myth which has obscured much of the significance and complexity of her writing.

To understand how that myth arose, and why her modernism was forgotten, one needs to go back to the history of her reception as a writer, and to the break between her early reputation and her later fame. There is no doubt that Ford Madox Ford, impresario to so many male writers of modernist fiction, considered her of their camp in his somewhat de haut en bas introduction to her first collection of stories, The Left Bank, published in 1927. He commended her admirable attention to the exemplary models for Anglo-Saxon modernist prose, Flaubert and Maupassant, and in particular praised with some surprise ‘the singular instinct for form possessed by this young lady, an instinct for form being possessed by singularly few writers of English and by almost no English women writers’ (LB 24–5). Most of those who reviewed her first four novels also identified her with the modern school, comparing her to the Imagist poets, to Hemingway, to Katherine Mansfield – though, unlike Ford, what tended to strike those early reviewers about her as a woman writer was not so much the excellence of her style as her obsession with the more disagreeable aspects of life and womanhood.