In 1949 Jean Rhys was living in Beckenham, Kent, already no longer a separate town, but absorbed into Greater London. She always disliked England, cold in climate and in soul as she had felt it to be ever since she first arrived from the West Indies in 1907, but the stolid and unyielding respectability of suburban Beckenham came to discomfit her more than anywhere else. Jean Rhys discomfited Beckenham too: when she first arrived she was ‘living in sin’, as local gossip quickly guessed and doubtless put it. She got drunk, quarrelled with her neighbours, and appeared in court nine times over two years on charges ranging from throwing a brick through the window of a neighbour whose dog had (allegedly) killed her cats, to biting a policeman. She had published nothing since her fourth novel, Good Morning, Midnight, in 1939, aptly named, as she later commented, to greet the war (JRL 97). Yet through all the terror of the Blitz, and the unexpected and devastating death of her second husband in 1945, she went on writing, short stories that were not to be published till many years later, and early versions of the book that was to become Wide Sargasso Sea. In 1946, she sent a collection of these short stories to Constable, but they turned them down. By the autumn of 1949 she had become deeply discouraged: her third (now legal) marriage was under stress, and her husband, she suspected correctly, was heading for financial and personal disaster. Although he had owned the house in Beckenham some time before he moved her in, it was in terrible repair and very damp. She had no friends nearby, and had lost touch with her London literary contacts. She had spent some harrowing and humiliating days in Holloway, under psychiatric observation, after berating the magistrate at her latest trial. ‘He asked me if I had anything to say. So I said it ’, she wrote to her friend Peggy Kirkcaldy (CA 446). She was desperate for encouragement but found none in ‘damp and bloody’ ‘God-forsaken’ Beckenham (JRL 59). A local court doctor predictably pronounced her a hysteric: it seemed ‘rather odd’, the Beckenham Journal reported that she had commented, ‘to say that she was hysterical because she wrote books. It was rather English.’