Jean Rhys

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Jean Rhys
Occupation Novelist, short story writer, essayist
Genres modernism

Jean Rhys (August 24, 1890 - May 14, 1979), born Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams, was a mid 20th century Dominican novelist. She is best known for her novel Wide Sargasso Sea, written as a "prequel" to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre.[1]

Contents

[edit] Early life

Jean Rhys was born in Roseau, Dominica on 24 August 1890. Her father, William Rees Williams, was a Welsh doctor and her mother, Minna Williams (Lockhart family), was a third-generation Dominican Creole of Scottish ancestry.

Jean Rhys was educated at the Convent School and moved to England when she was sixteen, sent there to live with her "starchy" aunt, Clarice. She attended the Perse School for girls where she was made fun of because of her accent and outsider status, Cambridge (1907-08) and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London (1909) where they despaired of her ever being able to speak proper English; later she worked unsuccessfully as a chorus girl (1909-10).

When her father died in 1910, Rhys was forced to abandon her studies. In need of money, she posed nude for a British artist, probably William Orpen, in 1913.

During the First World War Jean Rhys served as a volunteer worker in a soldiers' canteen. In 1918 she worked in a pension office.

In 1919 Rhys married the French-Dutch journalist and songwriter Jean Lenglet, the first of her three husbands. She lived with him, in 1920-22, in a rootless wandering life in Europe, mainly in London, Paris and Vienna. They had two children, a son who died three weeks after his birth and a daughter, Maryvonne. They were divorced in 1932.

In the meantime, with Lenglet in prison, her work was introduced to English writer Ford Madox Ford and they met in 1922 in Paris, thereafter writing short stories under his patronage. At that time her husband was in jail and Rhys moved in with Ford and his his longtime partner, Stella Bowen. An affair with Ford quickly ensued.

During the period she was in Paris she lived a meager existence, while familiarising herself with modern art and literature and acquiring the alcoholism that would persist throughout the rest of her life. The resentment of a patriarchal society and feelings of displacement which Rhys experienced during this period of her life would eventually form some of the most important themes in her work.

Her first collection of stories, The Left Bank and Other Stories, was published in 1927. Her first novel, Postures, published in 1928, is a classical version of the fate of the innocent, helpless victim who does not have control of her own life. The book is considered to be an account of Rhys’ affair with Ford Madox Ford.

After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, published in 1930, was the story of Julia Martin, for whom poverty is a way to hide her need of love and security. She has been left by her companion, Mr. Mackenzie, to live in a cheap hotel, where she talks to herself. In Voyage in the Dark, published in 1934, the portrayal of the mistreated, rootless woman continued. In Good Morning, Midnight, published in 1939, Rhys used a modified stream-of-consciousness technique to portray the consciousness of an aging woman.

In the 1940s, Rhys all but disappeared from public view, eventually being traced to 3 Landboat Bungalows, Cheriton Fitzpaine, in Devon. But it was after that long retirement, when she published her masterpiece, Wide Sargasso Sea, in 1966, that Rhys emerged as a significant literary figure. With Wide Sargasso Sea she won the prestigious WH Smith Literary Award in 1967. In Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys returned again to the theme of dominance and dependence, ruling and being ruled, through the relationship between a self-assured European man and a powerless woman. Diana Athill of Andre Deutsch’s publishing house helped return Rhys’s work to a wider audience and was responsible for choosing to publish Wide Sargasso Sea.

Jean Rhys died on May 14, 1979, in Exeter, England, before completing her autobiography. In 1979, the incomplete text appeared posthumously under the title Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography.

[edit] Literary career

[original research?]

In her works, Jean Rhys draws from her life. Rhys’s short fiction shows a remarkable variety of themes. A significant number of stories recall her childhood in the Caribbean and range from a girl’s cruel sexual awakening to incisive sketches of the narrowness of small-island life.

In After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, 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.

Written in the 1930s, her novels explore her own emotional life, recounting pretty, no longer young women who find themselves down and out in large European cities. Without work, her characters depend on men, encounters, or former lovers for money to buy a hotel room, a drink, or a pair of gloves. Rhys’s writing often centered on the lives of displaced and disenfranchised women left to die at the whims of unfamiliar societies – echoing her own lived experience. Her literary style is spare and often noted for its distinctive blend of modernist techniques and West Indian sensibilities.[2]

The theme of alcohol dependency relates to the question of female desire and agency in Rhys's pre-war novels: Quartet (1928), After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1930), Voyage in the Dark (1934) and Good Morning Midnight (1938). These texts take issue with the dominant early-twentieth-century view of alcoholism as a "volitional monomania" characterized by a failure of will, adumbrating ideas that do not appear in the alcoholism literature of the social sciences and humanities until later in the century. Anticipating the claim of recent feminists that women's addictions can be seen as symptoms of patriarchal oppression or as protests against it, these novels suggest that women drinkers might choose addiction and refuse a recovery that would only return them to the predicament they were protesting in the first place. The bleak repetitiveness of female drinking in Rhys's pre-war novels is in constant tension with the forward movement of the romance plot their heroines fantasize. But alcoholic repetition usually triumphs, ironically undercutting not only the romance plot itself, but also the modernist celebration of femininity as comfortingly and naturally cyclical. Despite its importance, the role of alcohol in Rhys's early novels rarely receives more than a passing mention from their critics. After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, Voyage in the Dark and Good Morning Midnight were written to exorcise her own pain[3].

Rhys once declared, “I have only ever written about myself".

[edit] Appreciation

Rhys's writing often centers on the lives of displaced and disenfranchised women left to die at the whims of unfamiliar societies—echoing her own life experience. Her style is often noted for its distinctive blend of modernist techniques and West Indian sensibilities.

[edit] Selected bibliography

[edit] Archives

Rhys's collected papers and ephemera are housed in the University of Tulsa's McFarlin Library, Department of Special Collections and University Archives.


Biography: "A Life of Jean Rhys," by Lillian Pizzichini

[edit] References

  1. ^ Modjeska, Drusilla (1999). Stravinsky's Lunch. Sydney: Picador. ISBN 0 330 36259 3. 
  2. ^ Guardian review
  3. ^ Imperial Archive Project

[edit] External links

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Rhys"