Friday, May 13, 2011

English 212 Home Page

Welcome to E212, British Literature since 1760
Spring 2011 at California State University, Fullerton

This blog will offer posts on most of the authors on our syllabus as optional reading. While the posts are not exactly the same as what I may choose to say during class sessions (i.e. these are not usually exact copies of my lecture notes), they should prove helpful in your engagement with the authors and in arriving at paper topics and studying for the exam.

A dedicated menu at my wiki site contains the necessary information for students enrolled in this course; when the semester has ended, this blog will remain online, and a copy of the syllabus will remain in the Archive menu.
Required Texts

Greenblatt, Stephen et al, eds. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vols. DEF. 8th. ed. New York: Norton, 2006. Package 2 ISBN 0-393-92834-9.

Austen, Jane. Persuasion. Eds. Deidre Shauna Lynch and James Kinsley. 2nd. Edition. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004. ISBN 0-192-80263-1.


Week 16, Tom Stoppard's Arcadia

05/10. Tu. Tom Stoppard. Arcadia (Act 1, 2752-89).

Notes on Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia

SCENE ONE

First of all the play's title comes to mind. Arcady or Arcadia is the stuff of pastoral poetry. From Theocritus onward, it has been the location where shepherds muse about their lives, complain about their loves, and sing lovely songs to the accompaniment of panpipes. Pastoral was always a sophisticated kind of poetry, as if it sprang into being fully formed like Athena from the head of Zeus. In that sort of poetry, desire and the ideal and reality are in constant conflict. That's why it is such a good name for the title of this play set in romantic era England, 1809 and then in the present, which at the time of writing would have been 1993. In the pastoral setting of a large country house in Derbyshire in the spring of 1809, we see an interesting dynamic play out – the interplay of neoclassical ideals and romantic Gothic in landscape, mathematical ideals of order juxtaposed with erotic desire and intrigue, a kind of chaos in the midst of paradise, dedication to learning intermingling with imaginative flights of fancy. I suppose you could say it all comes together in the stately dance at the end of the play, but we're not there yet.

Our first presenter is going to talk about the conversation between Thomasina Coverly and her tutor Septimus Hodge, who are discussing "carnal embrace" and Fermat’s last theorem, an enigmatic mathematical formula that was only solved shortly after Stoppard wrote his play. As the characters themselves imply, the theory in question calls to mind speculations about free will and the determination of all things by means of physics.

Thomasina is quite a prodigy; she notices that "if you stir backward, the jam will not come together again after you have initially stirred it. Heat and energy dissipate, and you cannot put Humpty Dumpty back together again, so to speak. The implications of that insight are profound.

But even as all the speculating and defining in these two very different areas of life are happening, Jellaby comes in with a letter for Septimus Hodge, a letter from Ezra Chater the poet, who is hopping mad about what he has heard from Noakes the gardener about a dalliance between Septimus and his wife, Mrs. Chater. What follows is a rather dandiacal, ironic exchange between Septimus and Ezra about the dalliance and indeed about the virtue or lack thereof possessed by Mrs. Chater. Capt. Brice is able to add some very useful information to this discussion.

Anyway, while all of that is going on we are also treated to a conversation about the philosophy of landscape, which was an important factor in the transition from the neoclassical 18th-century in England to the romantic era that was in dialogue with it. Lady Croom is not happy with turning charming old neoclassical Sidley Park into a Gothic theme park. It is as if the picturesque is somewhere between an emphasis on rationally apprehended beauty and the irrational sublime; imagination and sensibility are, of course, coming into greater prominence. We should be careful to note that we are talking about emphasis here, not a complete break with the past. But anyway, Lady Croom is not comfortable with what the gardener Mr. Noakes seems to be up to. What is it that makes life most worth living – passion, the wild and the unpredictable, or the beautiful and orderly? Or both?

The scene ends with Septimus reading and note from Mrs. Chater and folding it up and inserting it into the pages of Mr. Chater's book.

SCENE TWO

The room remains largely the same, but now we are in the present time, so we can surmise that there will be a certain continuity of life and interest between the earlier characters and the ones to which we are going to be introduced. Mr. Noakes's sketchbook has now become a curiosity, but it's there nonetheless, and the same is true of Lady Croom's garden books.

Bernard Nightingale, an academic with a romantic sounding name, wants an introduction to the researcher Hannah Jarvis to get some information from her regarding the presence of Lord Byron on the estate all those years ago. Bernard and Valentine, the latter of whom is a proponent of Chaos theory, get into a silly argument for a moment about the value of statistical analysis of literature. Bernard doesn't have a great deal of patience with that sort of thing, and the argument will crop up again later. Should we study literature in a scientific manner, or should we go in only for the human element? That's actually a current debate that has taken on a more interesting cast in the last 10 or 15 years because scholars have been putting all sorts of material online and doing language studies of periodicals and novels based on the remarkable power of modern computers. When did a particular word first start to be used commonly? What changes in sensibility does that increasing usage indicate, and so forth? Anyway, Bernard doesn't care for it – perhaps he remembers the clunky beginnings of that debate back in the 1970s, when structuralists became interested in doing statistical analysis of literary works.

Bernard introduces the subject of Byron by mentioning Hannah's biography of Lady Caroline Lamb, one of Lord Byron's famous aristocratic lovers – she's the one who called him "mad, bad, and dangerous to know." Bernard is trying to find out what on earth Lord Byron was up to here at Sidley Park back in 1809, and he wants to know about Septimus Hodge as well because Hodge was a friend of Lord Byron. They went to school together. Hannah is interested in the so-called Sidley hermit because she's working on some ideas about "the nervous breakdown of the Romantic Imagination." The hermit died in 1834, and as Bernard points out, so did Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Essentially, as you can see on page 2771, Hannah is interested in tracing the origins of the romantic manner in Gothic landscape and sensibility. Where did the Romantics get their ideas, particularly with regard to landscape theory? What she sees is imitations of imitations. Now Hannah knows from Thomas Love Peacock that Byron visited Sidley Park. And you learn on 2772 that Hannah is a pretty stern critic of romanticism – she calls it a sham perpetrated against the values and aesthetics of the enlightenment. The Sidley Park hermit, to her thinking, is the very emblem of the driving out of the Enlightenment ideals of order until they go mad. Anyway, you can see that she and Bernard are going to be at swords drawn throughout the play, even if in comic fashion.

Bernard offers to make a deal with Hannah – together, they can strike a blow against professional scholars of Lord Byron by offering up scandalous new information. That's kind of a silly idea, of course, because Byron's life involved a number of scandals, though I don't mean that to detract from his image. He was an awesome poet and died organizing the fight for Greek independence against the Turks. But he was also a womanizer whose conduct drove him into self-imposed exile on the continent. So to continue, Bernard has noticed that there's some mighty peculiar language in a copy of "The Couch of Eros," a book of poetry by Ezra Chater: "to my friend Septimus Hodge, who stood up and gave his best on behalf of the Author – Ezra Chater, at Sidley Park, Derbyshire, April 10, 1809." Bernard, as we find out, believes Lord Byron killed Ezra Chater in a duel and that that is why he left England in such haste shortly thereafter. Hannah thinks it's all nonsense – why would Lord Byron keep his mouth shut about a romantic duel? But Bernard is unfazed by her criticism. The scene ends with the silent character Gus offering Hannah an apple as if he were Satan from Paradise Lost. They are, after all, entering something like forbidden territory – digging up what Bernard purports to be a secret from the past. From the past of a major literary figure – nothing unsettles academics so much as that. What a Gothic shiver down the spines of those committed to the rational pursuit of knowledge!

SCENE THREE

The conversation between Thomasina and Septimus is a witty exchange about the power of love, and how to deal with loss, as she laments the disappearance of so many works of ancient literature. The subject of this conversation is a segue to discussion of the duel proposed between Mr. Chater and Septimus. Septimus's attitude is worthy of Beau Brummel for its wit and insouciance.

SCENE FOUR

It seems to me that the process of information-gathering more and more follows the path of Valentine's Chaos theory, which I think relates nicely to the neat formulation Bernard has arrived at to explain alleged events at Sidley Park nearly two centuries ago. On 2784-85, Valentine remarks that migrating populations of animals are actually obeying "a mathematical rule," and the same is true for epidemics, average rainfall, cotton prices and a whole bunch of other things. As he puts it on 2785, "The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is. It's how nature creates itself, on every scale, the snowflake and the snowstorm." He is joyful about this insight. In one sense, Chaos theory embraces chaos, it embraces the unpredictable in ordinary life. But in another sense, it seems like a theory that is dedicated to the proposition that everything obeys rules – it's just that we don't have a firm grasp of what those rules for ordinary things are the way we do when we are talking about sub-atomic particles or the universe on the grand scale.

In the background of Valentine's discussion and of course what Septimus and Thomasina have been talking about are fundamental laws of physics. The first law of thermodynamics says that energy can be changed from one form to another but it cannot be either created or destroyed. The second law of thermodynamics says that with the passage of time, "differences in temperature, pressure, and chemical potential equilibrate in an isolated physical system." In other words, heat dissipates. Entropy, an associated concept, implies that "nature tends from order to disorder in isolated systems." Of course one could say that about the passage from neoclassicism to romanticism – that is sort of Hannah Jarvis's theory.

On 2787, we come across Hannah's tidbit that Lady Croom wrote her husband a letter explaining that her brother, Capt. Brice, married a Mrs. Chater. Bernard chips in, "There is a duel. Chater dead, Byron fled!"

SCENE FIVE

2789-93. Bernard is hot on the trail, commenting that "a few days after he left Sidley Park, Byron wrote to his solicitor John Hanson: If the consequences of my leaving England were ten times as ruinous as you describe, I have no alternative…." And then there is a letter by Thomas Peacock. In addition, there is the fact of those messages in Byron's copy of "The Couch of Eros." Might it be the case, Bernard asks rhetorically, that since Byron got the copy from Septimus, Septimus and not Lord Byron had in fact put the letters there? Valentine's answer is in the affirmative, but he is told to shut up. Bernard cannot believe that Lord Byron isn't the culprit; he can't believe Ezra Chater would be able to get along with Septimus Hodge if the latter had been the man who "screwed his wife and kicked the shit out of his last book." Hannah doesn't see why not. Then Bernard insists that there must be or there must have been a platonic letter, as he calls it, that would confirm his entire theory. A letter by Lord Byron, that is, saying something like "what a tragic business, but thank God it ended well for poetry." Bernard is so captivated by his own theory that he is even planning to appear on some television show as a "Media Don," which seems a bit ridiculous.

2794-98. Valentine is not convinced by any of it, and he and Bernard get into a spat about the relative value of science and humanistic inquiry. Valentine does not care about "personalities," and Bernard couldn't care less about statistical models of literary works or letters by famous people. He says, "If knowledge isn't self-knowledge it isn't doing much, mate." Then he demolishes Hannah's book jacket, claiming that the images of Lord Byron and Caroline Lamb are not genuine, which annoys Hannah. She tells Valentine not to let Bernard get to him, saying that it is nothing more than performance art. He just enjoys unsettling everyone around him. Her own thesis seems pretty rock-solid to her: the hermit of Sidley Park is "The Age of Enlightenment banished into the Romantic wilderness! The genius of Sidley Park living on in a hermit's hut."

SCENE SIX

2799-2802. Lady Croom recounts to Septimus that Lord Byron and Mrs. Chater were discovered together in Lord Byron's room – discovered by her husband, that is. Byron sent his friend Septimus a letter – something like Bernard's platonic letter – and Septimus promptly burns it. Lady Croom adds that "Capt. Bryce has fixed his passion on Mrs. Chater, and to take her on voyage he has not scrupled to deceive the Admiralty…" Septimus explains his behavior to Lady Croom, saying that "I thought in my madness that the Chater with her skirts over her head would give me the momentary illusion of the happiness to which I dared not put a face." In other words, he is flattering Lady Croom. Septimus burns two more letters, ones he himself had written.

SCENE SEVEN

2802-03. It appears that Bernard's theory has by now been turned into fodder for the tabloids. Chloe and Valentine discuss a modulation of deterministic theory, and Chloe makes a very Thomasina-like point: "the only thing going wrong is people fancying people who are supposed to be in that part of the plan." In other words, sexual attraction.

2804-05. Hannah offers her perspective on the pursuit of knowledge: it is the pursuit that counts, not the final results. She doesn't care about the argument between Valentine and Bernard. Nonetheless, Valentine has finished his calculations about the birds in Sidley Park, and the results are impressive, if perhaps gloomy. Thomasina, unfortunately, as we are informed here, died in a fire long before she could make anything of her own theory.

2806-07. Valentine credits the Sidley Park hermit with knowing more leading up to the second law of thermodynamics than anyone during his time. We notice that in this scene, the characters from the past and the present are merging together, appearing side-by-side. What almost amounts to a dalliance between Thomasina and Septimus plays out.

2810-11. Thomasina declares with great certainty that Newton's observations cannot quite be turned into a deterministic universe because what's left out is "The action of bodies in heat." And here since she refers to Mrs. Chater, I think she really is talking about erotic attraction. It's the same point that Chloe will later make. Thomasina is quite certain as well that she's going to marry Lord Byron.

2814-15. Hannah Jarvis demolishes Bernard's theory on 2814. It seems that Ezra Chater did not die at Sidley Park but rather in 1810 or thereafter, in Martinique from a monkey bite. She is also planning to out Bernard's theory in a journal letter in the Times in just a couple of days. Two points for her. So much for Bernard's ideas.

2816-20. At the play’s end, Thomasina and Septimus come together to waltz, and the candlestick flame signifies her impending death. Gus and Hannah dance as well, with her theory about Septimus being the Hermit finally shown to have been true: it’s the picture of Plautus and Septimus that does it. Bernard is caught in a scandal with Chloe and has to leave, like a lesser Lord Byron. The point of the dance is that even though not all of the concerns of these searchers after knowledge have come close to the truth about Sidley Park and its inhabitants, and even though Valentine would seem to have won out with his gloomy talk about the world’s doom, what is left in the end is attraction and some measure of energy, some measure of grace. The human reaction to unknowability and possibly even the end, is to dance.

Week 15, T.S. Eliot, Auden, Rhys

05/03. Tu. T. S. Eliot. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (2289-93); "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (2319-25).

Notes on T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

Eliot is both erudite and capable of a fine comic touch, both of which qualities are to be found in this poem. Notice the funny rhymes and repetitions, as if the speaker can’t quite take himself seriously. He’s a superfluous man, and there’s no prospect of a duel or something like that putting him on the trail of a heroic end. The consciousness in the poem is going nowhere eloquently. How to communicate one’s passion? And what’s the point? The loss of power of art itself seems to be one theme referenced in this poem; notice the comic mentions of “visions and revisions” (33) and those women who keep talking about Michelangelo as if the fellow were a subject of mere gossip. The allusion to Marvell’s appeal to time is brilliant – there’s no pressure of time here, in fact “there will be time” for just about any sort of foolishness, triviality, deception and masking. There will be time for anything but truth and full humanity, or the present moment in its authenticity.* The poem even seems to ask, “well, what’s the point of laying all this predicament bare -- this inability, really, to do or even feel much of anything?” The answer we get isn’t much of an answer. The reference to mermaids towards the poem’s end, I think, is one way of saying that the poet’s task of encouraging us to transition to a state of vision isn’t going to be carried out here, today: our speaker can’t hear them singing. He’s no Hamlet, no hero, not a man who’s likely to be led beyond himself. Perhaps that’s just as well those sirens tend to lead you to your doom, you know. Only Odysseus had dealings with them, and even he had himself tied to the mast of his ship. In the end, there’s no way to emerge from the subterranean superfluity evoked by the poem: not until, “human voices wake us, and we drown.”

*To his Coy Mistress
by Andrew Marvell (1681)

Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love's day....

Notes on T.S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent”

The past is altered by the present. We might consider this simply good neoclassicism—the past is a stable entity, yet it is not unattainable for us. It seems to me that for Eliot, European literature is one large lyric poem, unified like the poetry that Cleanth Brooks and other New Critics consider autonomous. Eliot means by historical sense something very different from historicism. It isn’t so much that ideas become obsolete, but rather that conditions render us unable to act or appreciate the relationship between past and present. It seems to be a perceptual problem brought on or intensified by material developments.

In fact, says Eliot, only the present can render the past intelligible. So how is this idea different from the romantic pursuit of ever-greater self-consciousness? The infinite march of reflective understanding, or the infinite regression of acts of self-consciousness—only not at the individual level.

Where does the individual poet get the ability to tap into this tradition? Well, see Matthew Arnold, who says that the man and the moment are necessary to genuine creation. Arnold says that we need a current of true and fresh ideas. Eliot seems to think that there is not such a current in his own day, so the poet becomes rather a bookish creature. The poet, that is, must be difficult in this modern age.

Eliot uses the term depersonalization. We might look at this demand of his from a few different perspectives. Northrop Frye, for example, says that Eliot is interested in eastern mysticism and religion. In such religious contexts, one achieves a sense described by the phrase “thou art that.” The terms karma and atman come to mind—karma is due to selfishness or desire, and atman is a kind of identification with the world without completely losing one’s individuality—it is a “total self.”

And of course, this is what romanticism is always trying to accomplish—recovering a lost unity between mind and nature, between an individual and all others. Well, we might also bring up Matthew Arnold, who writes about the need for disinterestedness, the ability to remain aloof from the goings-on of the world in all its self-interested frenzy. Arnold’s term refers to criticism, of course, not so much to poetry, but the point is that one needs to get outside one’s ordinary skin and achieve a certain degree of objectivity about the object of one’s attentions. Like Matthew Arnold, Eliot offers a formulation that betrays a certain pathos, a personal need to escape from personality. Notice that Eliot uses terms such as self-surrender. Perhaps his scientific metaphor of platinum covers up this romantic pathos. Indeed, we might compare his metaphor to romantic inspiration theory. The mind of the poet serves as a catalyst for language drawn from tradition and culture; tradition itself speaks through the poet. In a sense, then, this is an expressive theory—but what is expressed is not the poet’s personality but rather something much larger than himself. The poetic process is rather like the achievement in Hindu religion of “atman.” It is fair to remind ourselves that romantic theorists do not necessarily advocate simple theories of self-expression—they capture the complexities of language as a medium for spirit, and it makes sense to describe romanticism as an encounter between language and the poet, not simply as self-expression. In any case, the reward for readers is a truly new, authentic experience with art.

The poet has an experience with language and tradition, and is not simply expressing desires that flow from autonomous consciousness. Language and tradition use the poet; they express themselves through poetry. Again, it is worthwhile not separating Eliot entirely from romantic theory. Do good poets ever simply express their feelings? Oscar Wilde points out that “all bad poetry originates in sincere emotion.” When Eliot uses the term “fusion,” there is something in that term of the romantic symbol. The metaphor is scientific, but it carries theological overtones. The romantic symbol fuses things that were disparate, overcomes the gap between subject and object.

See the nightingale reference—this is a concrete image that serves as a focal point for disparate feelings. A complex, traditional literary image of this sort has the power to unify and embody otherwise disjointed feelings. So the poet is a medium who wields such images, he is not a personality that needs to express itself. His primary task is to combine images and words drawn from the literary tradition.

The New critics claim that poetic context warps ordinary or denotative meanings to suit the context of the poem. On this page, Eliot refers to emotion in this way. He rejects Wordsworth’s theory that emotion is recollected in tranquility, favoring instead a different kind of concentration. He seems to like the older or combinatorial terms of faculty psychology—for an author like Sir Philip Sidney, remember, originality was not the point of writing poetry.

We should mention imitative theory—the poet does not imitate but rather serves as a catalyst for the past, for tradition. Repetition is not the goal, but rather a scientific version of poetic creation comes to the forefront. It is as if Eliot is trying to achieve a balance between neoclassical respect for culture and modern faith in “making it New,” with a trace of romantic creative pathos thrown in for good measure. Eliot does not assume that tradition is simply stable, so pure imitative theory would not make sense for him. I don’t think he would agree that we can simply point to touchstones, as Matthew Arnold would call them.

Eliot calls emotion impersonal, and he means that emotion is embodied in the poem and sustained by its contexts. Up to now, we have listened to Eliot offer advice to the poet, as many poet-critics have done. But let’s ask at this point where the reader fits into Eliot’s scheme. The implication of what I just said about emotion getting embodied in an image or in the poem is that the reader, like the poet, must go out of himself and be willing to engage in a certain kind of transaction with language. So reading a modernist poem like The Waste Land turns out to be a very difficult endeavor.

W.H. Auden. "In Praise of Limestone" (2435-36); "The Shield of Achilles" (2437-38); "Poetry as Memorable Speech" (2438-41).

Notes on W. H. Auden

"In Praise of Limestone" (2435-36)

This conversational, pastoral poem is directly about Florentine landscape and the endurance of Mediterranean civilization and history made by creatures of perishing flesh, bone, and blood, but Auden universalizes his and others’ relationship to the rock in question, and in the end it turns out to be a poem relevant not only to the lovely Florentine landscape but also to his own north-England native region, Yorkshire, which itself shelters beautiful limestone formations. Yes, limestone – the impressionable rock seems so suitable to “inconstant” man, so suitable to the products and processes of imagination. It isn’t for those who see life as more solid, more otherworldly-tending, and who expect too much, but for those whose ties to the land remain strong, who stay in love with what Sidney called “the too-much love earth.”

"The Shield of Achilles" (2437-38)

Ekphrasis (from ekphrazein, to speak out, to call an inanimate object by name; or, more recently, to describe a visual work of art in literature) is the relevant term for this poem. Homer created pathos with his ekphrastic shield passage in book 18 of The Iliad, and the shield itself depicted the universe in microcosm. Auden's poem has to do with the death of heroism in modern times, to be replaced by regimentation and blight. Even imagining the heroic seems beyond the poem's urchins and "boots,” and what place is there for Thetis and Achilles in the modern world?

"In Memory of W. B. Yeats" (2429-31)

How a poet becomes a text, is disseminated into the world’s stream of language, words. So what is Mr. Yeats’ significance now? "Poetry makes nothing happen," but it is still a "way of happening," suggests Section II, and “survives / In the valley of its saying.” Section III expands on that thought in a way that I think goes beyond the usual formalist claims about the insular richness of poetic language that it might at first seem to indicate. The world’s an unforgiving place, but in the long run, it “Worships language and forgives / Everyone by whom it lives” (50). To sing of humanity’s unsuccess is still necessary, and to sing of its success as well: poetry can lead us to seek justice and other good things, and persuade us again that the best emotions and affinities are permanent in us, and worth expressing. It need not run into the street shouting at us lessons in morals and politics to have its greatest impact.

“Poetry as Memorable Speech” (2438-41)

Leave it to Auden to get to the heart of the matter. His formulation looks back to Shelley’s fine words about the first poets being clear perceivers and purveyors of “the before unapprehended relations of things” in rhythmic, passionate speech. Anybody who tries to learn something knows that Auden is right about how we make things stick: we remember what has an emotional charge for us. That’s perhaps why some foreign words you’re trying to learn stick like batter on an unbuttered griddle, and others slip away like water. And of course it’s why some kids can remember infinitely many baseball stats but somehow can’t be bothered to do their mathematics homework.

Good poetry connects emotionally with a person, and is not simply “memorable” in the rote sense but in a deeper one: it’s generative of insight: “The test of a poet is the frequency and diversity of the occasions on which we remember his poetry” (2439). Both on big occasions and in little, seemingly insignificant ones. Honestly, I think you could say much the same of excellent prose, even of certain works of culture criticism by Ruskin, or Carlyle, or Wilde, or any other great prose writer, even though we don’t often read their work aloud – it isn’t strictly “speech,” but it’s memorable all the same.

Auden certainly demands that a poem be “a well-made verbal object,” but he isn’t very fond of high-art conceptualization that separates poetry from the flow of life. Neither is he satisfied with the older theories about poetry as individual expression: “a universal art can only be the product of a community united in sympathy, sense of worth, and aspiration” (2440). Well, Matthew Arnold had said as well that for great art, you need both “the man and the moment,” or the results would be less than ideal. Auden ends his piece by addressing rather directly the concern of lots of C19-20 artists and appreciators of art: the average bloke, influenced by scientific discourse and utility-saturated modernity, tends to demand that art make itself immediately useful. No can do, Auden declares: but it can quicken the imagination and spirit in preparation for making the decisions that need to be made. As critic Kenneth Burke put it a bit less elegantly than Auden but still insightfully: literature is “equipment for living.”

Jean Rhys. "The Day They Burned the Books" (Norton Vol. F, 2356-61) and "Let Them Call It Jazz" (2361-72).

Notes on Jean Rhys

I haven't yet found time to post notes on this author.