Jean Rhys Biography and List of Works

West Indies-born writer - self-destructive and alcoholic, whose familiarity with the seedy side of life marks her work. Rhys's has referred to herself as "a doormat in a world of boots." Her fiction deals with the plight of the helpless female, victimized by her dependence on a man for support and protection. She is best known for Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), a novel that gave voice to Edward Rochester's mad wife in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre.

"She found pleasure in memories, as an old woman might have done. Her mind was a confusion of memory and imagination. It was always places that she thought of, not people. She would lie thinking of the dark shadows of houses in a street white with sunshine; or trees with slender black branches and young green leaves, like the trees of a London square in spring; or of a dark-purple sea, the sea of a chromo or of some tropical country that she had never seen."
(from After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, 1931)

Jean Rhys was born in Roseau, Dominica, West Indies. Her father was a Welsh doctor and her mother was a Dominican Creole. Rhys's Creole heritage, her experiences as a white Creole woman, both in the Caribbean and in England, deeply influenced her life and writing. As a child she loved literature and longed to visit the places she read about. At the age of 17 her father sent her to England. She attended the Perse School, Cambridge (1907-08), and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London (1909). 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 ghost-wrote a book about furniture. She also received a small allowance from a former lover. During World War I she was a volunteer worker in a soldiers canteen and in 1918 she worked in a pension office.

In 1919 Rhys went to Holland and married the French-Dutch journalist and songwriter Jean Langlet. From 1920-22 she lived with him 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. 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. Rhys and her husband were divorced.

"The perpetual hunger to be beautiful and that thirst to be loved which is the real curse of Eve."
(from 'Illusion' in The Left Bank, 1927)

In 1927 Rhys published her first collection of stories, The Left Bank and Other Stories, taking the penname Jean Rhys. Her first novel, Quartet (1928), is a classical version of the fate of the innocent helpless victim caught in a sexual game that she does not understand. The book is considered to be an account of Rhys's affair with Ford Madox Ford. It tells the story of Marya, a young English woman. Unemployed Marya meets and marries a Polish man who lives in Paris. While her husband is in prison a friend seduces her.

"I also was tired of learning and reciting poems in praise of daffodils, and my relations with the few 'real' English boys and girls I had met were awkward. I had discovered that if I called myself English they would snub me haughtily: 'You're not English; you're a horrid colonial.'"
(from 'The Day They Burned the Books' in The Collected Short Stories of Jean Rhys, 1968)

The portrayal of mistreated unlucky woman continued in Rhys's following works. In Voyage in the Dark (1934) a young chorus girl gives herself to her older lover, has an abortion, and becomes the passive victim of other men and women. In Good Morning, Midnight (1939) Rhys used a modified stream-of-consciousness technique to portray the consciousness of an aging woman, Sasha Jensen. Sasha has returned to Paris, where she reviews the happiest, and the most desperate moments of her life. "She must cry so that others may be able to laugh the more heartily." When a young man picks her up, she renews her relationship with society.

From 1939 to 1957 Rhys dropped from public attention. In 1934 she married Leslie Tilden Smith, who died in 1945. Two years later she married Max Hamer, who had served a prison term. He died in 1966. For many years she lived in the West Country, often in great poverty. In 1959 her novel Good Morning, Midnight was adapted by Vaz Dias for the BBC. Encouraged by Francis Wyndham, Rhys started to write again, and her short stories were published in the London Magazine and Art and Letters. Rhys continued to live alone in her primitive Devon cottage at Cheriton FitzPaine, drinking heavily but still writing.

Rhys gained international acclaim in the 1960s with the publication of her most admired novel, Wide Sargasso Sea. It tells the story of conflicting cultures embodied in the character of Antoinette Bertha Cosway, a West Indian. She marries a constrained and domineering Englishman, Edward Rochester, and follows him to his home country. Like Bertha in Jane Eyre, she ends up confined to the attic of her husband's country house. Edward is a tormented character who admits that "she had left me thirsty and all my life would be thirst and longing for what I had lost before I had found it." Much of the action of the novel takes place in the West Indies. In her madness and misery Antoinette burns the house and herself.

Rhys was made a CBE in 1978. Among her awards were the W.H. Smith Award, the Royal Society of Literature Award, and an Arts Council Bursary. She died on May 14, 1979, in Exeter. In the same year her unfinished autobiography Smile Please (1979) appeared.

For further reading: Jean Rhys by Louis James (1978); Jean Rhys: A Critical Study by Thomas F. Staley (1979); Jean Rhys by Peyer Wolfe (1980); Jean Rhys by Arnold E. Davidson (1985); Ladies and the Mammies: Jane Austen and Jean Rhys, ed. by Selma James (1986); Jean Rhys and the Novel as Women's Text by Nancy R. Harrison (1988); Critical Perspectives in Jean Rhys, ed. by Pierrette Frickey (1990); Jean Rhys: A Life and Work by Carole Angiers (1990); Jean Rhys's Historical Imagination: Reading and Writing the Creole by Veronica Marie Gregg (1995); Jean Rhys by Carol Ann Howells (1991); Jean Rhys by Sanford Sternlicht (1997); Jean Rhys by Sylvie Maurel (1999); The World of Jean Rhys by Sue Thomas (1999) - See also: Creole Identities and Race Relations in Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea and Sugar Cane Alley - Jean Rhys Biography by Eimer Page

The Left Bank and Other Stories, (1927)