Vulnerability in Jean Rhys's Late Gerontography

Abstract: Jean Rhys wrote journalism and short fiction about old age in her mid- to late-eighties. In the stories "Rapunzel, Rapunzel," "Who Knows What's Up in the Attic?," and "Sleep It Off Lady," Rhys limns vulnerability through intertextual registers and the subtle orchestration of tropes of weather in and weathering of old age and figures of the stranger. I reinvigorate scholarly study of these stories by contextualizing Rhys's hitherto unexamined journalism and drawing on concepts and critical vocabularies from social gerontology and vulnerability studies.