Female Abjection Through the Eyes of Jean Rhys

At Gawker, Mariah Kreutter examines the work of Jean Rhys, and how her exploration of femalle suffering still echoes throughout contemporary fiction, particularly in works by Ottessa Moshfegh and Sally Rooney. “It’s there in Rhys’s frank writing about sex,” Kreutter writes, “financial precarity, romantic abjection; it’s there in her fragmentation, in her flat sentences, in her heroines’ relentless indifference; in her mining of her own experience; in her blatant yet canny deployment of self-pity.”