The Trouble with “Victim”: Triangulated Masochism in Jean Rhys’s Quartet

Abstract

While Jean Rhys is perhaps most well-known for Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Rhys critic Thomas F. Staley reminds readers of the formative position that Quartet, her first published novel, holds:

The importance of Quartet in the Rhys canon is difficult to overemphasize, for it reveals the discovery and initial development of that original voice and tone which was to characterize and define her fiction throughout the 1930s… it does record the beginning of what was to become Rhys’s distinctive style… [and] initiates most of the major themes preoccupying Rhys’s later fiction. (36–37)