All in all, it is perhaps not surprising that the first critics to get away from the myths and stereotypes through which Rhys was so often read were her fellow Caribbeans. Rather than evoking notions of a ‘Rhys woman’, they recognized that these fictions were exploring a troubled and divided subjectivity at a very particular historical and social nexus. But her reception as a Caribbean writer has not been straightforward. It was not until the sixties that Rhys was given much serious attention as a Caribbean writer, and how far and in what sense her work is distinctively Caribbean has continued to be hotly debated. Rhys herself was uncertain by then whether she could still call herself West Indian – if she were sure about her identity in anyway, it was in her certainty that she was not English – ‘pseudo-English’ at the most, as she puts in her memoir, Smile Please (SP 135). But what was she? There is no doubt of her love for the disturbing beauty of her native Dominica, a recurrent if occasional theme from her earliest stories onwards, evoked most powerfully in her final novel, Wide Sargasso Sea. Yet in all her writing about the island there is the sense, sometimes sad, sometimes envious, sometimes resentful, that it belongs more to the black majority than to the white Creoles. On the one hand, she could say, like Anna in Voyage in the Dark, ‘I'm a real West Indian … I'm the fifth generation on my mother's side’ (VD 47). Yet on the other, like Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Sea, a white cockroach to the ex-slaves and a white nigger to the English, she might also say, and during the time she was writing that novel increasingly felt, ‘between you I often wonder who I am and where is my country and where do I belong and why was I ever born at all’ (WSS 64). After all, three of her first four novels, and many of her short stories, are firmly placed in Europe, and have heroines with no apparent knowledge of the Caribbean. As the white descendant of slave-owners, coming to England in 1907 at the age of seventeen, and during the course of her long life returning only once for a visit to her birthplace, should she be considered a Caribbean writer at all?