Lilian Pizzichini

Jean Rhys, alchemist and alcoholic, lived a long and angry life. In her writing, she found sanctuary, and maybe redemption, by transmuting the lead and arsenic of her daily relations into literary gold. Lilian Pizzichini's The Blue Hour is a dispassionate look at the career and careening of a woman of whom it must have been difficult to be an indifferent acquaintance. A few, always, felt a need to hold her hand, and kept her afloat; most people, I think, would have preferred to slap her. If show more you've read Rhys novels, you will recognize much of the biographical material in The Blue Hour. Pizzichini covers Rhys's childhood in the Caribbean, her teen years in London, her life as a showgirl, as a gamine in Paris, and as a wife in Vienna. Rhys unabashedly cannibalized her life for her art. Her writing is spare, precise, and cuts like a knife. And so, by reflection, The Blue Hour slashes, involuntarily, at its own portrait of Rhys. An alcoholic heroine is, ultimately, a contradiction in terms, and judging Rhys is a close call. Did she cleverly harvest the fruits of her alcoholism to enable her embittered isolation, or did she heroically transcend her isolation in writing about it? Jean Rhys - whether lady, tiger, or feral kitten - kneaded people with very sharp claws. show less

I read this biography in conjunction with a reread of Wide Sargasso Sea and a complete reading of Rhys's other four novellas and her short stories. As such, it was a useful biography to put the works into the context of Rhys's life, but it was also frustrating due to its lack of footnoting, which makes it difficult at times to distinguish between Rhys's largely autobiographical fiction and the actual facts of Rhys's own life. This lack of footnoting gives this biography a feeling of show more "popular" biography, and I'm not sure Rhys is of sufficient interest to draw a large "popular" readership to her life — but, in contrast, I think academic readers are going to find the lack of footnoting disconcerting.

Useful, but Lilian Pizzichini is, shall we say, no Juliet Barker, Jenny Uglow, or Hermione Lee.

And now, having finished Rhys's own Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography, I'll add that Pizzichini is too reliant on Rhys's own published writings in Pizzichini's own authorship of this biography. show less

The Blue Hour. A portrait of Jean Rhys is a very uninspiring biography of Jean Rhys. It reads like an expanded homework assignment of a highschool student. The biography seems to heavily rely on Rhys's own Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography. Since there are no footnotes, it is hard to see what other material went into the book, or whether the author has done any other research at all.

Well-written biographies can keep readers spellbound for 500 to 1000+ pages, and more often than not show more can act as an eye-opener, truly revealing a whole range of knowledge and ideas on their subject. However, The Blue Hour. A portrait of Jean Rhys is boring and dry stuff, that is hard to get through. show less