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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 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) — biography from Wide Sargasso Sea… (more)
Wide Sargasso Sea 8,004 copies, 237 reviews
Good Morning, Midnight 1,334 copies, 35 reviews
Voyage in the Dark 779 copies, 15 reviews
After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie 641 copies, 15 reviews
Quartet 625 copies, 9 reviews
Tigers Are Better-looking 221 copies, 4 reviews
Sleep It Off Lady 209 copies, 3 reviews
Let Them Call It Jazz 134 copies, 2 reviews
Early Novels 27 copies
The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories (Contributor) 410 copies, 2 reviews
Mistresses of the Dark [Anthology] (Contributor) 118 copies, 3 reviews
The Big New Yorker Book of Cats (Contributor) 116 copies, 1 review
Women and Fiction: Volume 2 (Contributor) 72 copies
Nightshade: 20th Century Ghost Stories (Contributor) 63 copies, 2 reviews
The Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology (Contributor) 62 copies, 1 review
Perversity (Translator, some editions) 54 copies
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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).
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