hero? Does it depend on whether one is a man or a woman? Is the nature of heroism engendered? Are there different categories of heroism - a heroism of the mind and a heroism of the body, for example? The life and work of the novelist Jean Rhys help us to understand the nature of the heroic. Rhys herself may be considered to be a hero even though her life was not by conventional means a success. Indeed, it might be considered to be a stereotypical failure: She drank heavily, had a number of unhappy love affairs, and seems to have lost her talent or at least her will to write for decades. But in the end. A woman who called herself a "doormat in a world of boots" proved by her life and in her work that doormats are durable indeed.

Rhys's sense of herself as a certainly less-then-conventional-heroic...
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