Pioneering author Jean Rhys was hard to define. In London, artists give it a try

To truly understand Jean Rhys, it is perhaps easiest to take the writer in her own words. ‘I would never really belong anywhere, and I knew it, and all my life would be the same, trying to belong, and failing,’ she wrote in Smile Please, her posthumously published autobiography. ‘Always something would go wrong. I am a stranger and I always will be, and after all I didn’t really care.’

Celebrated as a pioneer of feminist and postcolonial literature, the Dominican-born Rhys’s vision continues to inspire a new generation of Caribbean voices today, including Jamaica Kincaid and Caryl Phillips. Perhaps more surprising, though, is her affinity with the visual arts: now her work finds new life at Michael Werner Gallery’s ‘Postures: Jean Rhys in the Modern World’, an exhibition curated by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and critic Hilton Als. Drawn from archival research at Yale, the show brings together drawings, paintings, books, and archival material alongside works by artists such as Kara Walker, Celia Paul, Hurvin Anderson, and Francis Picabia, creating, ambitiously, a ‘collective portrait’ of Rhys’s life.

The first section comprises art that references Rhys’s childhood in Dominica. Reggie Burrows Hodges’s Crossing Roots (2025) presents an enigmatic encounter: a woman and a tropical scene emerge from black linen. Then there’s Anderson and Walker’s lurid paintings of the West Indies, and Cynthia Lahti’s Cousins (2005): a raku-fired sculpture of fourteen young girls on pedestals that form something like a dispersed family tree.

The next section deals with Rhys’ time in London, where she moved at sixteen, and the final section with Paris, where she would meet writer Ford Madox Ford. Under his tutelage, Rhys completed her first book in 1928, The Left Bank and Other Stories; the following year, she fictionalised their affair in Quartet. Through the 1930s she published After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, Voyage in the Dark, and Good Morning, Midnight: novels of haunted, lonely women – avatars of Rhys and her peripatetic life spent adrift in London, Paris, and Vienna – navigating poverty, leaning on drink and pills to endure their isolation. Dismissed by critics as beautifully written but bleak, Rhys withdrew to Devon until 1966, when she would publish her masterwork Wide Sargasso Sea: a reimagining of Jane Eyre through the eyes of the Creole Bertha Mason.

As you might expect, several paintings seem to resemble Charlotte Brontë like those by Celia Paul and Gwen John. Elsewhere, portraits by Winold Reiss and Picabia take a different approach, offering Art Deco-inflected visions of the New Woman: stylish, self-possessed, and alert to the possibilities of modern life. Rhys, with her restless intellect and defiance of convention, was most certainly among them.

Although she spent most of her life in relative exile, drifting between Parisian hotels and bleak English lodgings, Dominica remained the wellspring of Rhys’ imagination throughout her career. A modernist of the margins, her work spoke to the dislocated and the overlooked, offering – in sparing, unsentimental prose – a view into lives and cultures largely ignored by European male writers.

It was precisely this attentiveness, Als suggests, that made Rhys fertile ground for a visual dialogue. ‘Because to work with [Michael Werner Gallery’s] roster of stars is like plunging one’s hands into mounds and mounds of delicious gold, rich in intellectual and sensual nutrients that, here, not only spoke to Rhys, but about her and the visual artist simultaneously,’ he says. ‘[It’s] a collaboration that happens when you open your mind to the possibilities of language and the visual working in tandem, not “just” in support of one another.’

Jean Rhys at Michael Werner Gallery in London runs until 22 November