Jean Rhys (1890–1979)
Author of Wide Sargasso Sea
About the Author
Jean Rhys, 1890 - 1979 Writer Jean Rhys was born in Roseau, Dominica, West Indies. Her father was a Welsh doctor and her mother was a Dominican Creole. Her heritage deeply influenced her life as well as her writing. At seventeen, her father sent her to England to attend the Perse School, Cambridge show more and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. Unfortunately, she was forced to abandon her studies when her father died. Rhys worked as a chorus girl and ghostwrote a book on furniture. During World War I, she volunteered in a soldier canteen and, in 1918, worked in a pension office. In 1919, she went to Holland and married the French-Dutch journalist and songwriter Jean Langlet. They had two children, a daughter and a son who died as an infant. She began writing under the patronage of Ford Madox Ford. Her husband was sentenced to prison for illegal financial transactions. Her affair ended badly with Ford, and her marriage ended in divorce. In 1934, she married Leslie Tilden Smith who died in 1945. Two years later, she married Max Hamer who died in 1966. Rhys lived many years in the West Country, most often in great poverty. In 1927, Rhys' first collection of stories, "The Left Bank and Other Stories," was published. Her first novel, "Quartet" (1928), is considered to be an account of her affair with Ford Madox Ford told through Marya, a young English woman. In "Voyage in the Dark" (1934), the character is a young chorus girl involved with an older lover. She has also written "Good Morning, Midnight" (1939) and "Sleep It Off Lady" (1976) and the internationally acclaimed "Wide Sargasso Sea" (1960). Rhys was made a CBE in 1978 and received the W.H. Smith Award, the Royal Society of Literature Award and an Arts Council Bursart. Rhys died on May 14, 1979 in Exeter. In the same year, her unfinished autobiography "Smile Please" appeared. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Image credit: Jean Rhys foto: Modernista
Works by Jean Rhys
“The Day They Burned the Books” 2 copies
The Lotus 1 copy
Sargassomeer. Roman. Lächeln bitte! Unvollendete Erinnerungen (Werke in vier Bänden, 4. Band) (1985) 1 copy
Werke in vier Bänden 1 copy
Temps Perdi [short story] 1 copy
Viagem no escuro 1 copy
Alla Ti Kl/Sargassohavet 1 copy
Associated Works
Her True-True Name : an anthology of women's writing from the Caribbean (1989) — Contributor — 48 copies
Regarding Jane Eyre: Writers Respond to Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (1997) — Contributor — 18 copies
Gender in Modernism: New Geographies, Complex Intersections (2007) — Contributor — 12 copies, 1 review
Josefina, bedien die Herren : Geschichten von Frauen und Männern aus Lateinamerika — Contributor — 1 copy
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Rhys, Jean
- Legal name
- Rees William, Ella Gwendolen (born)
- Other names
- Vivienne Gray
Emma Gray
Ella Gray - Birthdate
- 1890-08-24
- Date of death
- 1979-05-14
- Gender
- female
- Education
- Perse School for Girls, Cambridge
Royal Academy of Dramatic Art - Occupations
- novelist
short story writer
autobiographer
essayist
nude model - Organizations
- American Academy of Arts and Letters (Foreign Honorary ∙ Literature ∙ 1979)
- Awards and honors
- Order of the British Empire (Commander, 1978)
American Academy of Arts and Letters (Foreign Honorary, Literature, 1979) - Relationships
- Williams, William Rees (father)
Williams, Minna (mother)
Lenglet, Willem Johan Marie (Jean) (first husband)
Tilden-Smith, Leslie (second husband)
Hamer, Max (third husband) - Short biography
- Ella Gwendoline Rees Williams wrote under the pseudonym Jean Rhys. She was born to a British-Creole family in the British colony of Dominica in the West Indies, and left the island in 1907. She began publishing her writing in the late 1920s. Her most famous work was Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), which won the W.H. Smith Award and the Heinemann Award. In it, Rhys returned to her frequent themes of conflicting cultures, dominance and dependence. Jean Rhys died in Exeter, Devon, before finishing the autobiography she was working on. The incomplete text appeared posthumously under the title Smile Please (1979).
- Nationality
- UK
- Birthplace
- Roseau, Dominica, West Indies
- Places of residence
- London, Middlesex, England, UK
Cheriton Fitzpaine, Devon, England, UK
Paris, Île-de-France, France
Vienna, Austria - Place of death
- Exeter, Devon, England, UK
- Burial location
- St. Matthew's Church Cheriton Fitzpaine, Mid Devon District, Devon, England
- Map Location
- Dominica
United Kingdom
Members
Discussions
2. Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys in Backlisted Book Club (March 2022)
Reviews
Sharp, wry stories with a critical eye on acceptance and ostracism. It's not that they remind me of Shirley Jackson overall, but that they would understand each other. (Not horror SJ, but caustic suburban commentary SJ.) It is curious that the market copy talks about the loneliness of lives left behind, where I saw a lot of the strength and insight of the marginalized.
Wide Sargasso Sea is one of the most intellectually challenging books I've read in a while. There is so much packed into this small 100-page novel that it's no surprise scholars love it.
In Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, Mrs. Rochester is portrayed as a wild woman, mad, and subject to fits of violence and sexual depravity. True to Victorian mores, she is from the West Indies, where woman are promiscuous and prone to hysteria. Jean Rhys, herself born in Dominica, takes this assumption about show more women and especially Creole women and exposes it for what it is: the assumption of a culture steeped in colonial brutality and sexual violence against women of color.
Rhys's novel begins on Dominica in 1839, only a year after full emancipation had been granted to enslaved people in the British colonies. The Slavery Abolition Act, implemented in 1834, had paid lip-service to abolition, but required the formerly enslaved to work for their owners in an "apprenticeship" position for a year. This may have cushioned former slave owners from the immediate economic impact, but enraged those it supposedly freed. It is during this tumultuous and fraught time period that Antoinette was growing up. Heightening her precarious state, her father died, and her mother, a Creole from Martinique, was left in a vulnerable state, with both mother and daughter falling prey to avaricious men.
A young Mister Rochester, second son to a wealthy British gentleman and newly arrived in the Caribbean to seek his fortune, is quickly married to Antoinette, whom he renames Bertha (in itself a sort of violence), for thirty thousand pounds. But almost immediately, he becomes suspicious that she is promiscuous and has inherited a tendency to insanity. She must be controlled and subdued.
These dual themes of the aftermath of colonization and the treatment of women seen as Other make this a work ripe for analysis. Rhys builds on her family's history, some of whom were slave owners in Dominica, her youth on the island, and her subsequent life as a self-perceived outsider in Britain. Written over the course of two decades, when many thought she had died, so removed had she become from literary circles, the book is the result of innumerable revisions. The end product is written with an economy of language that makes every word significant. The work is divided into three parts, the first told from Antoinette's point of view growing up on the island, the second from Mr. Rochester's, and the last from Antoinette's and Grace Poole's.
Layering history, the literary relationship to Jane Eyre, and personal recollections, Wide Sargasso Sea puts the reader in the uncomfortable position between the colonizer and colonized, oppressor and oppressed, and forces them to reconsider their own relationship with both the classic text and history. show less
In Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, Mrs. Rochester is portrayed as a wild woman, mad, and subject to fits of violence and sexual depravity. True to Victorian mores, she is from the West Indies, where woman are promiscuous and prone to hysteria. Jean Rhys, herself born in Dominica, takes this assumption about show more women and especially Creole women and exposes it for what it is: the assumption of a culture steeped in colonial brutality and sexual violence against women of color.
Rhys's novel begins on Dominica in 1839, only a year after full emancipation had been granted to enslaved people in the British colonies. The Slavery Abolition Act, implemented in 1834, had paid lip-service to abolition, but required the formerly enslaved to work for their owners in an "apprenticeship" position for a year. This may have cushioned former slave owners from the immediate economic impact, but enraged those it supposedly freed. It is during this tumultuous and fraught time period that Antoinette was growing up. Heightening her precarious state, her father died, and her mother, a Creole from Martinique, was left in a vulnerable state, with both mother and daughter falling prey to avaricious men.
A young Mister Rochester, second son to a wealthy British gentleman and newly arrived in the Caribbean to seek his fortune, is quickly married to Antoinette, whom he renames Bertha (in itself a sort of violence), for thirty thousand pounds. But almost immediately, he becomes suspicious that she is promiscuous and has inherited a tendency to insanity. She must be controlled and subdued.
These dual themes of the aftermath of colonization and the treatment of women seen as Other make this a work ripe for analysis. Rhys builds on her family's history, some of whom were slave owners in Dominica, her youth on the island, and her subsequent life as a self-perceived outsider in Britain. Written over the course of two decades, when many thought she had died, so removed had she become from literary circles, the book is the result of innumerable revisions. The end product is written with an economy of language that makes every word significant. The work is divided into three parts, the first told from Antoinette's point of view growing up on the island, the second from Mr. Rochester's, and the last from Antoinette's and Grace Poole's.
Layering history, the literary relationship to Jane Eyre, and personal recollections, Wide Sargasso Sea puts the reader in the uncomfortable position between the colonizer and colonized, oppressor and oppressed, and forces them to reconsider their own relationship with both the classic text and history. show less
Even the exotic West Indian setting couldn’t save this novel for me. It begins well enough, with details about how the once-successful white Jamaican slave-holding Cosway family has fallen into serious decline after Britain's Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 and the death of the protagonist Antoinette’s father. Were it not for the loyalty of the family’s cook from Martinique, the Cosways would be even further up the proverbial creek without a paddle. Racial hostilities boil beneath the show more surface of this lush and sinister island.
The still-young Mrs. Cosway, a shadow of her former self, remarries. Unfortunately, as the resentment of the blacks continues to mount, Mason, her new husband, doesn’t heed the woman’s pleas to leave the island. Coulibri, the formerly idyllic estate is burnt down, Antoinette’s disabled younger brother dies of injuries sustained in the fire, and the girl’s mother descends into madness. Fast forward a few years and Antoinette is being married off by her step-brother, Richard Mason; a sizeable dowry is the bait. Enter (the never-named) Mr. Rochester, a naive but arrogant weakling, an unfavored son sent from England by his father to make a financial deal, which, unfortunately for all concerned, involves marriage to a sexually alluring if less-than-respectable young woman.
Okay. Fair enough so far. Then the novel takes a nose dive. A prequel to Jane Eyre, its prose, which always sounds more contemporary than authentic, now becomes increasingly vague, muddy, and unintelligible. And here we are again, right back in Jean Rhys territory, mired in the story of yet another beautiful woman who wants only to be loved but who’s tormented by the hatred by a cad. Rochester has been taken in by the rumours about the Cosway family, Antoinette’s promiscuity, and her incipient madness. Like clockwork, he predictably tells his wife he doesn’t love her. The now desperate heroine thinks obeah, voodoo magic, might help. It doesn’t; it cannot. The way it works in a Rhys novel is that rejection is inevitable and more or less emotionally fatal to the protagonist. There are no exceptions here. Antoinette goes mad.
Had I the interest—or had Rhys given me any reason to actually care for her characters, I suppose I could’ve tried to parse the tangled writing, whose style is of the stream-of-consciousness variety. To me it reflected the impaired thinking of a writer too long under alcohol’s influence.
I know almost everyone thinks this book is a masterpiece. All those years I heard about it and believed I was missing something! Well, now I’ve read it, and I don’t think I was. show less
The still-young Mrs. Cosway, a shadow of her former self, remarries. Unfortunately, as the resentment of the blacks continues to mount, Mason, her new husband, doesn’t heed the woman’s pleas to leave the island. Coulibri, the formerly idyllic estate is burnt down, Antoinette’s disabled younger brother dies of injuries sustained in the fire, and the girl’s mother descends into madness. Fast forward a few years and Antoinette is being married off by her step-brother, Richard Mason; a sizeable dowry is the bait. Enter (the never-named) Mr. Rochester, a naive but arrogant weakling, an unfavored son sent from England by his father to make a financial deal, which, unfortunately for all concerned, involves marriage to a sexually alluring if less-than-respectable young woman.
Okay. Fair enough so far. Then the novel takes a nose dive. A prequel to Jane Eyre, its prose, which always sounds more contemporary than authentic, now becomes increasingly vague, muddy, and unintelligible. And here we are again, right back in Jean Rhys territory, mired in the story of yet another beautiful woman who wants only to be loved but who’s tormented by the hatred by a cad. Rochester has been taken in by the rumours about the Cosway family, Antoinette’s promiscuity, and her incipient madness. Like clockwork, he predictably tells his wife he doesn’t love her. The now desperate heroine thinks obeah, voodoo magic, might help. It doesn’t; it cannot. The way it works in a Rhys novel is that rejection is inevitable and more or less emotionally fatal to the protagonist. There are no exceptions here. Antoinette goes mad.
Had I the interest—or had Rhys given me any reason to actually care for her characters, I suppose I could’ve tried to parse the tangled writing, whose style is of the stream-of-consciousness variety. To me it reflected the impaired thinking of a writer too long under alcohol’s influence.
I know almost everyone thinks this book is a masterpiece. All those years I heard about it and believed I was missing something! Well, now I’ve read it, and I don’t think I was. show less
Having now soldiered through the fourth of Jean Rhys’s autobiographical, alcohol-and-female-dependency-themed novels, I really don’t see its author as “one of the foremost writers of the twentieth-century.” Tales of passive, suggestible, self-pitying, depressive protagonists drifting through life, attempting to sponge off, cling to, and be saved by a succession of invariably unworthy men—sordid dramas which unfold in seedy, sometimes bedbug-infested hotels and squalid boarding show more houses—don’t do much for me. Stylistically, Rhys may have been a competent enough writer, but style can only take bleak content so far. I don’t see good evidence here that it can turn dark material into literature worth reading. While pushing through these novels over the last couple of weeks, I frequently thought how unfortunate it was for Rhys that she didn’t have access to Alcoholics Anonymous or quality psychotherapy. Hers was no way to go through life. Given the abuse her body suffered, it’s a marvel she was able to write at all and very surprising that she lived into her late eighties.
I think Good Morning, Midnight is Rhys’s most nihilistic work. In it, the depressive protagonist, “Sasha”—observed by a London friend to be laid ever lower by age and drink—is sent to Paris for a couple of weeks’ rest on that friend’s dime. How anyone could believe that a woman in this state might benefit from such a solitary trip is beyond me. Perhaps the friend needed respite from witnessing the spiral of addiction. Once in France, Sasha encounters random men in bars or on the streets—a couple of Russians; a young man, René, a French-Canadian who has recently escaped from his Foreign Legion post in Morocco; and a repugnant commercial traveller who is staying in the same hotel.
The slim plot Rhys offers consists of Sasha drifting from café to café, or restaurant to cabaret, with one or another of these men, a drink at every stop. The reader is also given the woman’s hazy recollections of a failed marriage years before to the shifty Enno, whom she wed when young in order to escape London. Once hopeful that the marriage would be for all-time, in looking back, Sasha regards its end—with Enno’s abandonment of her after the (merciful) death of their infant son—as entirely foreseeable and inevitable. One of the few diversions from a seemingly endless series of scenes in which Sasha fails to connect can be found in the two hours she spends in a Parisian hat shop. (The right hat is critical for preserving any vestige of dignity that remains. The goal: “look normal enough so people won’t stare at you.”) Not surprisingly, though, the episode doesn’t add much interest overall.
I think I knew early on that Rhys wasn’t going to be for me; nevertheless, I effortfully worked through the complete novels in the order that Diana Athill arranged them in the Norton edition. It didn’t take me long to know that, with the possible exception of Wide Sargasso Sea, I was reading them to have read them—to be done with them. And now, thank God, I am. For good. show less
I think Good Morning, Midnight is Rhys’s most nihilistic work. In it, the depressive protagonist, “Sasha”—observed by a London friend to be laid ever lower by age and drink—is sent to Paris for a couple of weeks’ rest on that friend’s dime. How anyone could believe that a woman in this state might benefit from such a solitary trip is beyond me. Perhaps the friend needed respite from witnessing the spiral of addiction. Once in France, Sasha encounters random men in bars or on the streets—a couple of Russians; a young man, René, a French-Canadian who has recently escaped from his Foreign Legion post in Morocco; and a repugnant commercial traveller who is staying in the same hotel.
The slim plot Rhys offers consists of Sasha drifting from café to café, or restaurant to cabaret, with one or another of these men, a drink at every stop. The reader is also given the woman’s hazy recollections of a failed marriage years before to the shifty Enno, whom she wed when young in order to escape London. Once hopeful that the marriage would be for all-time, in looking back, Sasha regards its end—with Enno’s abandonment of her after the (merciful) death of their infant son—as entirely foreseeable and inevitable. One of the few diversions from a seemingly endless series of scenes in which Sasha fails to connect can be found in the two hours she spends in a Parisian hat shop. (The right hat is critical for preserving any vestige of dignity that remains. The goal: “look normal enough so people won’t stare at you.”) Not surprisingly, though, the episode doesn’t add much interest overall.
I think I knew early on that Rhys wasn’t going to be for me; nevertheless, I effortfully worked through the complete novels in the order that Diana Athill arranged them in the Norton edition. It didn’t take me long to know that, with the possible exception of Wide Sargasso Sea, I was reading them to have read them—to be done with them. And now, thank God, I am. For good. show less
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Statistics
- Works
- 37
- Also by
- 26
- Members
- 16,471
- Popularity
- #1,377
- Rating
- 3.6
- Reviews
- 404
- ISBNs
- 286
- Languages
- 17
- Favorited
- 66
