Jean Rhys (1890-1979)
Jean Rhys was born Ella Rees Williams to her Creole mother; her father was a Welsh-born doctor in Roseau, on the Windward Island of Dominica, West Indies.
As a white Creole girl in a predominantly black community, Jean Rhys felt socially and intellectually isolated. In 1907, at the age of 17, her father sent her to England. After she left the island she returned only once, in 1936.
She attended the Perse School, Cambridge (1907-08), and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London (1909).
Jean Rhys was forced to abandon her studies when her father died. She worked for a while as a chorus girl with a touring musical company and ghostwrote a book about furniture.
She also received a small allowance from a former lover. During World War I she was a volunteer worker in soldiers canteens and in 1918 she worked in a pension office.
In 1919 Jean Rhys went to Holland and married the French-Dutch journalist and songwriter Jean Langlet.
In 1920-22 she lived with Jean Langlet in Vienna and Budapest, then in Paris, and after 1927 mainly in England. They had two children, a son who died in infancy and a daughter. Jean Rhys began writing under the patronage of Ford Madox Ford, whom she met in Paris.
At that time her husband was sentenced to prison for illegal financial transactions. Her affair with Ford ended with much bitterness. Jean Rhys and her husband were divorced.
In a biography of Ford, Jean Rhys is only mentioned with two words, her name. Ford Madox Ford published her articles in his magazine, and continued with his own, as if nothing had happened, and Jean Rhys was left abandoned by him.
Jean Rhys never forgot Dominica; the Caribbean had honed her sensibility for colours, scents, and the beauty of nature. She remained nostalgic for the emotional vitality of Dominica's black peoples, and the conflict between its beauty and its violent history, she described in many of her books.
Jean Rhys's Dominican background is important in her work, playing a large part for example in "Voyage in the Dark", and in short stories such as "The Day they Burned the Books."
Dominica is the most natural of the Caribbean islands. Its peaks rise to more than 5000 feet despite being only 29 miles long. The beautiful contrasts between dense vegetation, deep gorges, waterfalls and stretches of arid wasteland are totally unlike the atmosphere that Jean Rhys was presented with upon her arrival in Britain.
Jean Rhys identified with the Black community in her childhood, and indeed throughout her life. She envied the Black community its vitality and often contrasts the sterility of the white world with the richness and splendour of black life.
Themes of attempted friendship with black girls recur in her work, an obvious example being the figures of Tia and Christophine in "Wide Sargasso Sea", but Anna Morgan in "Voyage in the Dark" also attempts to find a friend among the Black community.
Jean Rhys's early life paralleled that of other postcolonial writers who have felt themselves betrayed by the reality of Britain; it was only when she was in her seventies that she found a social niche in England.
The unconventional writing of Jean Rhys prevented her work from receiving due recognition for much of her lifetime.
When she says, "I have only ever written about myself," one must not confuse her life and her writing. If one considers all the terrible losses in her life, her tendencies to self-destruction and alcoholism are explained. Jean Rhys once called herself "a doormat in a world of boots."
Her first published novel was "Postures" (1928, American title "Quartet: A Novel", 1929). While it lacks the confidence of her later work, in the character of Marya Zelli it introduced what was to become the recognisably Jean Rhys heroine - sensitive, sexually attractive, and vulnerable, with a tendency to self-defeat.
It also shows Jean Rhys's stylistic control in moving within characters and in observing them objectively, without any irony.
In "After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie" (1930), the heroine is Julia Martin, who is recovering from the experience of sexual betrayal, and attempting a futile liaison with the decent but inadequate Mr. Horsfield. The moral descent is completed in "Good Morning Midnight" (1939), a brilliant evocation of psychic disorientation and despair.
The heroine, Sasha Jensen, remembers a life of love and defeat, and faces the ultimate darkness suggested by the novel's title. Told in first person narrative, alternating between the past tense and the continuous present, "Good Morning, Midnight" is a technical tour de force.
"Voyage in the Dark" (1934), Jean Rhys's third published but first-written novel, is her most autobiographical work of fiction. Its heroine, Anna Morgan, aged nineteen, has come to England from Dominica.
The novel opens with a compelling evocation of the Caribbean, its colours, sights, smells, and warmth. As the novel recounts Anna's attempt to come to terms with her new life, the inner narrative traces a remembered life in the Caribbean.
Jean Rhys disappeared from public view until 1958, when the BBC dramatised her "Good Morning, Midnight". The publication of "Wide Sargasso Sea" followed in 1966. In this novel Jean Rhys gave voice to Edward Rochester's mad wife in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre.
Jean Rhys's Creole heritage, her experiences as a white Creole woman, both in the Caribbean and in England, influenced deeply her life and writing.
Jean Rhys's great-grandfather, John Potter Lockhart, acquired a plantation in Dominica in 1824. After his death in 1837 his widow was left to run the estate. The riots in 1844 following Emancipation from Slavery, led to the destruction of the estate, and the burning of the house.
Jean Rhys visited the plantation, and was affected by the experience. An awareness of this may help to explain some of the more ambiguous attitudes in "Wide Sargasso Sea", such as Antoinette's caustic remarks to Christophine and Tia about their blackness.
Jean Rhys's own background, as well as Antoinette's, was that of the former slave-owning Creole community.
Jean Rhys is known as a modernist writer, writing throughout the twentieth century, and is often paralleled with Joseph Conrad and T.S. Eliot.
Like other modernist authors, Jean Rhys' writing often centres on themes of isolation, absence of society or community, the sense of things falling apart, dependence, and loss.
Like Sylvia Plath, Jean Rhys uses her life experiences; the pain, the rawness, and the wounds, as the material from which she writes her fiction.
Jean Rhys has recently gained popularity in the field of feminist literature. In the seventies, when Jean Rhys was still alive, feminism, or "woman's lib" as it was called, centred on sexual oppression, which excluded Jean Rhys' literature.
What the feminists of the seventies did not realize is that Jean Rhys was years ahead of them. While they centred solely on sexual oppression, Jean Rhys questioned economic, racial, class, colonial and sexual oppression.
It has only been through the eighties that she has become more widely recognized as a valuable writer.
Not only has she been recognized as a feminist writer, but also recently, V.S. Naipaul, Nobel Prize winner, suggested that she should be reread in terms of colonial origins.
In fact, until her publication of "Wide Sargasso Sea", her Caribbean origins went largely unmentioned.
The publication of "Wide Sargasso Sea" coincided with the recognition of West Indies' literature being recognized as a valuable addition to worldly literature.
With Naipaul's suggestion, she has been largely included into the world of postcolonial literature, and her novels are reread through the theories.
Critics in the early part of Jean Rhys's career assumed that she was "non-intellectual" because they thought that she did not make many allusions to other texts.
However, it turned out that it were English critics spreading these rumours, and that she made plenty of allusions to French texts, with which the English critics were unfamiliar.
Jean Rhys's final years brought fame and freedom from financial anxiety. She published a collection of new short stories, "Sleep it off Lady", and worked on her autobiography, unfinished at death, published posthumously as "Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography" (1979).
Her letters were published in 1984 in England as "Jean Rhys's Letters: 1931-1966", edited by Francis Wyndham and Diana Melly.
"I must write. If I stop writing my life will have been an abject failure. It is that already to other people. But it could not be an abject failure to myself. I will not have earned death." Jean Rhys, 1954
After reading about the life story of Jean Rhys, I'm proud to say, I was born in Dominica, like Jean Rhys.
Mary Sylvester
Biographical data
24 August 1890 Birth of Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams at Roseau, Dominica.
1907-8 Attends the Perse School, Cambridge.
1909 Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London.
1909-10 Tours as a chorus girl.
1919 Marries Jean Lenglet and moves to Paris. 29 Dec., birth of a son who dies three weeks later.
1922 Meets Ford Madox Ford.
1923-4 Husband in jail, affair with Ford.
1932 Divorce.
1947 Marriage to Max Hamer.
1957-66 Works on Wide Sargasso Sea, after public interest, following a radio broadcast of her work, tracks her down.
1966 Wide Sargasso Sea published.
Acknowledgements
Jean Rhys was made a CBE in 1978.
Some of her awards:
W.H. Smith Award
Royal Society of Literature Award
Arts Council Bursary
Jean Rhys died on May 14, 1979, in Exeter.
Selected works
The Left Bank and Other Stories, 1927
Postures, 1928 (as Quartet in 1929) - Kvartetti - film 1981, dir. by James Ivory, screenplay by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, starring Isabelle Adjani, Maggie Smith, Alan Bates
translator: Perversity (by Francis Carco), 1928
After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, 1931 - Herra Mackenzien j�lkeen
translator: Barred (by Edward de N�ve), 1932
Voyage in the Dark, 1934
Good Morning, Midnight, 1939 - Huomenta, keskiy� - television film in 1959
Wide Sargasso Sea, 1966 - Siint�� Sargassosmeri - film 1992, dir. by John Duigan, starring Karina Lombard, Nathaniel Parker, Claudia Robinson
Tigers Are Better-Looking, with a Selection from the Left Bank, 1968
Penguin Modern Stories 1, 1969 (with others)
My Day, 1975
Sleep It Off Lady, 1976
Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography, 1979
Jean Rhys Letters 1931-1966, 1984
Early Novels, 1984
The Complete Novels, 1985
Tales of the Wide Caribbean, 1985
The Collected Short Stories, 1987
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Copyright by Mary Sylvester, Freiburg 2020
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