Jean Rhys

Gage is played by Wentworth Miller.

Wentworth graduated from Princeton University with a B.A. in English after completing a senior thesis titled Doubling and the Identity Construct in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper, Jean Reese's Wide Sargasso Sea, and Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre.

I did a film version of The Yellow Wallpaper.

While at Princeton, he was a cartoonist for the school paper, performed with the a cappella group, the Princeton Tigertones, and was a member of the Quadrangle Club and the Colonial Club.

so many interesting elements to her background that I feel like I don't know if people know about, about her.

No, and I don't think you, you know, and I think to introduce her to people and, you know, I think she's one of these writers that's, uh, known for her silences as much as she is for her work, and I think that that isn't, like, I always kinda chafe at that, you know, when, when we talk about Gina Berriault or we talk of, uh, Jean Rhys or we talk about all these, and, and they're often women who, who go silent for, for, for all kinds of complicated reasons, you know? And, and I think, you know, you mentioned, you mentioned Zora Neale Hurston.

I mean, Zora Neale Hurston wasn't accepted either, you know, for lots of reasons, including the fact that she was a woman and that, and that she wasn't somehow political enough in some ways.

And I think, I think West probably was tagged with that too, that, you know, writing about class, sure, but not, you're not facing the, um, the things directly might have been an argument.

Do you see yourself in this way? And if so, what does that mean to you?

I do see myself in this way, but I would, i- if the term didn't exist, still, um, believe in the remarkable powers that contributing to, I always quote Jean Rhys, the great lake of writing, contributing to the great lake of writing will give you the momentum and stamina and perseverance you need to actually be a writer.

I don't know any other way.

I think if my longevity rested on my quote unquote successes or accolades, I would have quit a long time ago.

Certainly, I mean, I think

I've just been reading a Daphne du Maurier and I was also thinking about Jean Rhys.

I think both of those contemporaries of Christie were much more reclusive than she ever was.

She was, you know, still more plugged in, especially in the 50s, to, you know, the world around her.

Katie Hickman and Kapka Kasabova were among 22 new RSL fellows elected in 2026.

Their induction was announced at the RSL Summer Party, and they signed their names in the RSL rollbook using a pen from its permanent collection, which includes pens owned by Lord Byron, Charles Dickens, George Eliot and Jean Rees.

And now, back to the studio.

Lauren, it's been such a pleasure talking to you.

The house becomes the asylum.

So when we get to the mid, late, mid-to-late twentieth century, you have Jean Rhys' Wide S- Sargasso Sea in 1966, and this performs a radical act of reclamation.

It was written after the second wave feminism had begun critiquing Bertha's erasure.

The novel reconstructs Antoinette Cosway's life before Thornfield Hall.

Gilman exposes what many readers recognize intuitively, that the medical profession was complicit in female disempowerment.

That question becomes even more fascinating when you move into Wide Sargasso Sea, which essentially reimagines Bertha's life before the attic.

Jean Rhys did something incredibly powerful in that novel and took the woman his- that history reduced to a Gothic monster and gave her interiority again, and suddenly the, the mad woman was lonely, misunderstood, and colonized.

It completely changes the emotional atmosphere of Jane Eyre afterwards because you begin realizing how often women in Gothic fiction are transformed into symbols once their humanity becomes inconvenient.