Jean Rhys

Born Ella Gwendoline Rees Williams on August 24, 1890, on the Caribbean island of Dominica, Jean Rhys was the daughter of a Welsh doctor and a mother from a white Creole family with deep roots in the colonial Caribbean. At sixteen she was sent to England for her education, attending the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, but her instructors despaired of her accent and advised her father to withdraw her. Unable to train as an actress and refusing to return to Dominica, she drifted through jobs as a chorus girl, adopting stage names and living on the margins of English society. In 1919 she married the Dutch-French journalist Jean Lenglet and moved to Paris, where she came under the influence of Ford Madox Ford, who gave her a new name, Jean Rhys, and championed her first collection of stories, The Left Bank (1927). Her early novels, Quartet (1929), After Leaving Mr Mackenzie (1931), Voyage in the Dark (1934), and Good Morning, Midnight (1939), portrayed displaced women surviving in European cities with a spare, devastating honesty. After Good Morning, Midnight she virtually disappeared from public view for nearly three decades, living in obscurity in Devon and widely assumed to be dead. Then in 1966, at seventy-six, she published Wide Sargasso Sea, a reimagining of the madwoman in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre as a Creole heiress destroyed by her English husband. The novel was recognized as a masterpiece and transformed her reputation. She was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1978. She died on May 14, 1979, in Exeter, at the age of eighty-eight.

In 1949 the actress Selma Vaz Dias, wanting to adapt Good Morning, Midnight for the stage, placed an advertisement in the New Statesman asking for the whereabouts of Jean Rhys. Rhys, living obscurely in Beckenham and widely presumed dead, answered it herself. The advert, she said, lifted the numb, hopeless feeling that had stopped her writing.