Lucasta Miller

Disregarded for decades, Jean Rhys stayed true to her vision of life

Always uncompromising in her portrayal of gloom and squalor, she finally triumphed in her seventies with the masterpiece Wide Sargasso Sea

Jean Rhys, photographed in 1974. She was cruelly mocked in later life for her eccentricities. [Bridgeman Images]

Jean Rhys, who died at the age of 88 in 1979, lived to be forgotten and rediscovered. Like many readers, I first came across her through her novel Wide Sargasso Sea, which imagines the pre-history of Jane Eyre’s ‘madwoman in the attic’, the Creole heiress married off to Mr Rochester and then incarcerated by him at Thornfield Hall. When it came out to great acclaim in 1966, it marked the rebirth of a writer who hadn’t published a book for more than a quarter of a century and who had even been presumed dead.

Born Ella Gwendoline Rees Williams in Dominica in 1890, Rhys drew on her own background as a displaced Creole – the word indicates a white person from the Caribbean – to give splintered subjectivity to the character so brutally ‘othered’ by Charlotte Brontë. Her childhood in the tropics left its mark, though she was sent to school in England in her late teens and never went back except for one short visit. As the daughter of a Welsh doctor and a mother whose down-at-heel family had once been wealthy slave owners, she was caught between her colonial parents and the Afro-Caribbean servants whose culture and language she imbibed. (There’s a recording of the elderly Rhys singing a Kwéyòl song in the archive.) Issues of identity and alienation, power and exploitation echo through her entire oeuvre. She never felt at home. At 14, she had been sexually abused by a family friend, in whose whispered fantasies she was his slave, stripped and whipped.

Extraordinary though Wide Sargasso Sea is, it was when I read Rhys’s four earlier novels, set in Paris and London, two cities where she lived, that I was truly blown away. These works, especially her masterpiece Good Morning, Midnight (1939), reveal her as one of the 20th century’s greatest modernist writers, but her acceptance into the canon has been comparatively slow.

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