Date of Publication: 2008-08-01

-Jean Rhys, Quartet.

Cathleen Maslen’s Ferocious Things: Jean Rhys and the Politics of Women’s Melancholia closely engages with the most obvious theme of Rhys’s writing: the speaking and inscription of feminine anguish. Maslen resists easy generalisations with respect to Rhys’s portrayal of women’s psychic pain, attending carefully to the nuances of sexual, cultural and ethnic displacement which inform the suffering of Rhys’s protagonists. Acknowledging the many fine recent critical engagements with Rhys’s unique corpus of novels, Maslen insists that Rhys’s particular articulation of women’s pain presents a significant literary transgression, defying the intractable cultural interdiction against women ‘making a fuss.’ At the same time, this book engages with the problematic privileging of melancholic and nostalgic discourse in the Western canon in general. Rhys’s work, Maslen argues, simultaneously celebrates and resists fundamentally Eurocentric and anti-feminist paradigms of melancholia and nostalgia. In short, the ferocious melancholia of Jean Rhys’s female voices poses constructive paradoxes and points of departure for feminist and post-colonial debates in the 21st century.

Cathleen Maslen was born in Perth, Western Australia, in 1973. She graduated with a PhD from the University of Western Australia in 2006. Cathleen is the author of many essays on melancholia and mourning theory, and has published articles and lectures on these themes. Currently, Cathleen teaches contemporary literature, cultural theory and Renaissance studies at the University of Western Australia. Cathleen lives with her young daughter in the port city of Fremantle, Western Australia.

“This book pursues an original and fascinating analysis of melancholic identification in Rhys’s fiction ... one of the pleasures of reading this book was Maslen’s excellent and subtle reading of the texts, again and again giving new and sophisticated explications of how they work”.

Helen Carr

“Rhys’s heroines have always been a problem for feminist critics ... this book offers a way to read both the profound alienation of these heroines and also Rhys’s narratives with their gaps between female subjective experience and brittle satirical surfaces.”

Coral Ann Howells

‘At all times deeply engaging ... this book is a major contribution to Rhys scholarship and is sure to establish Rhys – rightly – as a major, deeply moving and critical writer within the melancholic tradition.’

Sue Thomas