The Figure of the Literary Outsider in the Work of Jean Rhys and T.S. Eliot

Abstract

While Eliot and Rhys have, at times, been listed together as contemporaneous authors they have rarely been studied as comparable or commensurate literary figures. However, both Rhys and Eliot saw themselves to differing extents as outsiders, particularly in the imperial centre of London, and the outsider is present in both authors’ work, being strongly linked to modernist urban spaces, as well as to ideas of gender, race, and class. This thesis seeks to examine, through a comparison of Rhys and Eliot, the outsider-author and the impact outsider status had on their work as well as questioning why the outsider was a figure not only of modernist fiction but the modernist world. In asking these questions, this thesis accounts for the extent to which the social cultural conditions of the early twentieth century, particularly the effects of empire and migration, generated the conditions for the formation of outsiders.