'Money, for the night is coming': Jean Rhys and Gendered Economies of Ageing

The published collection of Jean Rhys's correspondence opens with two undated photographs of Rhys on facing pages. The author's pose is nearly identical in the two images: her head rests on her hands and her large, dark eyes, rimmed with black liner, look directly out at the viewer. In both pictures, Rhys's hairstyle is exactly the same - though the colour and texture have changed - and the vivid pattern on her clothing is also similar. Both are portraits of a strikingly beautiful woman, and together they suggest a narrative embodying several concerns central to Rhys's early fiction: the exhibition of feminine beauty, the passing of time, and the social, biological and economic consequences of ageing for women. The strong continuities between the two photos, along with their striking differences, serve as a visual representation of the need for women to appear unchanging, to weave a narrative or create an image of the self that keeps the past and present contemporaneous in order to maintain value in the sexual marketplace. The inter-relations of gender, value, age and expenditure suggested by the two photographs are articulated in Jean Rhys's early novels, which depict the economy of investment and loss that women face as they age. In Rhys's texts - and particularly in her two first-person narratives - there is an attempt to recreate in prose the simultaneous experience of past and present, not simply as an example of modernist experimentation with narrative continuity, but also as a specifically gendered response to the economic and social consequences of ageing for women.