Jean rhys biography
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I Used to Live Here Once: The Haunted Life of Jean Rhys
By Miranda Seymour
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‘An absolute belter of a biography’ MARINA HYDE
A Times Literary Non-Fiction Book of the Year
An LA Times Best Book of the Year
An intimate, revealing and profoundly moving biography of Jean Rhys, acclaimed author of Wide Sargasso Sea.
An obsessive and troubled genius, Jean Rhys is one of the most compelling and unnerving writers of the twentieth century. Memories of a conflicted Caribbean childhood haunt the four fictions that Rhys wrote during her extraordinary years as an exile in s Paris and later in England. Rhys’s experiences of heartbreak, poverty, notoriety, breakdowns and even imprisonment all became grist for her writing, forming an iconic ‘Rhys woman’ whose personality – vulnerable, witty, watchful and angry – was often mistaken, and still is, for a self-portrait.
Many details of Rhys’s life emerge from her memoir, Smile Please and the stories
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Jean Rhys
British novelist (–)
Jean Rhys, CBE (REESS;[3] born Ella Gwendoline Rees Williams; 24 August – 14 May ) was a novelist who was born and grew up in the Caribbean island of Dominica. From the age of 16, she resided mainly in England, where she was sent for her education. She is best known for her novel Wide Sargasso Sea (), written as a prequel to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre.[4] In , she was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for her writing.
Early life
[edit]Rhys's father, William Rees Williams, was a Welsh medical doctor and her mother, Minna Williams, née Lockhart, a third-generation Dominican Creole of Scots ancestry.[citation needed] ("Creole" was broadly used in those times to refer to any person born on the island, whether they were of europeisk or African descent, or both.) She had a brother. Her mother's family had an estate, a former plantation, on the island.[citation needed] • The life of Dominican-born writer Jean Rhys is at once well-known and mysterious. Her career dipped and soared across both halves of the last century, across changes of name (Ella Gwendoline “Gwen” Rees Williams, Ella Lenglet, Jean Rhys) and changes of location (West Indies, England, Europe). Review: I Used to Live Here Once: The Haunted Life of Jean Rhys – Miranda Seymour (Harper Collins). Her early adult years were full. There had been a career on the stage as a chorus dancer, liaisons with wealthy men, and marriage to a charming Dutch bigamist and fraudster, which took her to The Hague, Paris, Vienna and Budapest. She experienced a flurry of literary fame in the late s and early s, when she was shepherded into print by Ford Madox Ford – their vexed relationship was used by both in their later writing. Then came oblivion, when her bleak urban tales seemed to chime too cruelly with pre-war and wartime darkness, years when publishers rejected her work and readers though