Rhys, Jean

Jean Rhys was born on 24th August 1890 as Ella Gwendolyn Rees Williams in Roseau, the capital of Dominica in the Caribbean, then a British colony. Her mother was from a Creole (part native Caribbean, part French) family, and her father was a Welsh doctor. She had a tremendously difficult life, starting from her time in the Caribbean, where she didn’t fit in with either the richer whites or with the blacks, and she was known as the ‘white cockroach’. No wonder she didn’t want to return to Dominica from England, where she was sent to study, aged 16, even though she hated it in England too. She spiralled into promiscuity and depression, but she was able to write fiction that some might say reflects her own life, and she maintained integrity and perfectionism in her work. Even her literary patron, Ford Madox Ford, took a sexual interest in her, which some say turned into a ménage à trois with him and his partner, Stella, and the affair ended bitterly, which could account for her growing pessimism. Rhys never seemed to settle anywhere and remained rootless. She called Cornwall ‘Bude the Obscure’ and Devon ‘a dull spot which even drink cannot enliven much’. She claims only to have written about herself; her writing is renowned for its presentation of the underdog or the outsider, and this vulnerability and sense of struggle is what makes her work appealing to many.

Image: Jean Rhys the writer
Source: G88keeper; Licence: Creative Commons