7 - Brief encounters: Rhys and the craft of the short story

Summary

I will post you the story tomorrow nearly three weeks too late … Its not right yet, too slow at the start too hurried at the end …

(Letter to Francis Wyndham, 6 March 1961)

I will finish Leaving School & Mr Ramage A bit sentimental perhaps, and the West Indies as they were sound unreal, but I cant help that.

(Letter to Olwyn Hughes, 25 February 1966)

Yesterday I posted a letter to Diana explaining the corrections I'm anxious to make in ‘Fifi’ and ‘Vienne’. With ‘Fifi’ its just a matter of deleting a few paragraphs but ‘Vienne’ is more complicated.

The chapter headings must go of course and be replaced by spaces but I want some of the ‘chapters’ left out altogether. They are not good & only confuse what story there is.

(Letter to Olywyn Hughes, 7 March 1967)

Rhys's interest in and success with the short story form have been compared favourably with that of other achieved writers, most evidently Hemingway (Brown 1986) and Katherine Mansfield (Wolfe 1980). Her first published text, ‘Vienne’, appeared in Ford's transatlantic review (vol. 2, no. 2, 1924) immediately after Hemingway's ‘Cross-Country Snow’ and in the same issue as an extract from Gertrude Stein's ‘The Making of America’.