Professors Vike Martina Plock and Felicity Gee discuss their recent work, which used Springboard funding to launch a community event celebrating internationally acclaimed author, Jean Rhys, and her connection to the South West.
(Featured image – Jean Rhys (left) with Mollie Stoner in 1970. Sourced from WikiCommons)
Amount of award: ÂŁ500
The Dominican-born novelist Jean Rhys lived in Cheriton Fitzpaine for the last twenty years of her life. It was in Devon that her most famous novel, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), was written. And yet, her presence in the region has been mostly ignored. We both work on and have published on Rhys. This academic interest inspired us to work together with Cheriton Fitzpaine residents, planning a public engagement event to raise Rhysâs visibility in the local community.Â
The funding allowed us to bring an additional Rhys expert from another university to our event. We were also able to invite Rhysâs biographer Miranda Seymour (I Used to Live Here Once: The Haunted Life of Jean Rhys, 2022),âŻwho ran a Q&A session about Rhysâs life in Cheriton Fitzpaine. The local theatre group delivered dramatized readings of Rhysâs work that were interspersed with short âexpertâ talks by academics. The event, held on Saturday 18th May 2024, received almost unanimously positive feedback, with many attendees who had never read Rhysâs novels declaring that they would now be interested in doing so. Feedback also suggested that the event helped to create a better understanding of Rhys, the author, in the village in which she lived for the last decades of her life.
The biggest challenge was the question on how to coordinate this activity with the Rhys estate, as under normal circumstances, public readings of her books are prohibited. We only got permission to do so because the event was run as a community rather than academic event. Indeed, we were fortunate to be working with a very active and committed group of residents who handled communication with the Rhys estate.
What worked extremely well at this event was the chosen format – using a mixture of short academic talks, dramatized readings, and Q&A sessions with the audience.
We were delighted to hear that our event has positively affected Rhysâs image in the region, which is exactly what we set out to do. We hope that plans to establish more long-lasting markers of Rhys in Cheriton Fitzpaine can now come to fruition.
Currently, we are in conversation with Cheriton Fitzpaine residents about a heritage installation in the village that commemorates Rhysâs life in Devon. However, this event has also shown that there is appetite for this kind of literary event in the Exeter region. Vike, in her role as Head of Department for English and Creative Writing, will propose to her colleagues a series of literary Devon talks to be held at the Devon and Exeter Institute or another suitable venue in Exeter. This will be an excellent opportunity to make the research we do at the university more visible and accessible to Exeter residents, strengthening existing links between the Department, local heritage institutions, and arts venues.