Francis King

Quite contrary

Eleven years after Jean Rhys’s death in 1979, Carole Angier published a monumental biography, a model of its kind, with 70 pages of notes and seven of bibliography.

Eleven years after Jean Rhys’s death in 1979, Carole Angier published a monumental biography, a model of its kind, with 70 pages of notes and seven of bibliography. Lilian Pizzichini’s ‘portrait’ of Rhys is a book of a wholly different kind. The best way to describe it is that it bears the same relationship to Angier’s work as Beryl Bainbridge’s novel According to Queeney to Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson. Both Pizzichini’s and Bainbridge’s books rely for their potent fascination not on extensive research but, to a remarkable degree, on empathy and imagination.

Pizzichini shows herself at her best when she writes of the 17 years spent by Rhys in her birthplace Dominica, before her parents abruptly decided that she should be despatched to England to be ‘finished’. In skilfully evoking the languorous, lush, steamy island in which, at the age of 12 — Rhys both suffered and enjoyed (the two emotions were all too often disastrously linked for her) sexual abuse at the hands of an elderly family friend, she relies to a large extent on Rhys’s own luminous accounts.

Repeatedly Pizzichini demonstrates that, apart from an all-powerful obsession with her writing, the two dominant emotions of Rhys’s life were rage and desperation. Here is one of those people for whom the key to being happy is, paradoxically, to be unhappy. Here also is the perfect paradigm of the victim as exploiter. Rhys’s physical and emotional fragility and her seeming inability to deal with any practical problem attracted to her a succession of patrons. But having availed herself of their kindnesses, she would then wantonly terminate a relationship by some act of pique, negligence or ingratitude.

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