Jean Rhys (1890–1979,) pseudonym of Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams, was a West Indian-born British novelist, short-story writer.
Born in Roseau, Dominica, Windward Islands, West Indies, Rhys moved to England in 1910 to train at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. However, her father’s death after only one term at the Academy compelled her to join a touring theatre company. At the end of World War I, she married the Dutch poet Max Hamerand and lived for many years in Paris. There she met Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, and other writers and artists. She had an affair with Ford Madox Ford, who supported her writing.
In 1927, Rhys published The Left Bank and Other Stories, set mostly in Paris or the West Indies of her upbringing. Four novels followed: Quartet (1928; originally titled Postures,) After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1930,) Voyage in the Dark (1934,) and Good Morning Midnight (1939.) Her female heroes were women living without financial support.
Rhys stopped writing for 30 years and then published her remarkably successful novel, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966,) a poetic, surreal narrative set in Dominica and Jamaica during the 1830s. It was based on the character of Rochester’s mad wife in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Further collections of short stories included Tigers are Better Looking (1968) and Sleep It Off, Lady (1976.)
Rhys’s unfinished autobiography, Smile Please, was published posthumously in 1979.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Jean Rhys
Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.
—Jean Rhys
Topics: Books, Reading
She could give herself up to the written word as naturally as a good dancer to music or a fine swimmer to water. The only difficulty was that after finishing the last sentence she was left with a feeling at once hollow and uncomfortably full. Exactly like indigestion.
—Jean Rhys
Topics: Books, Reading
The feeling of Sunday is the same everywhere, heavy, melancholy, standing still. Like when they say, As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.
—Jean Rhys
I am sad, sad as a circus-lioness, sad as an eagle without wings, sad as a violin with only one string and one that is broken, sad as a woman who is growing old.
—Jean Rhys
Age seldom arrives smoothly or quickly. It’s more often a succession of jerks.
—Jean Rhys
Topics: Age
I often want to cry. That is the only advantage women have over men – at least they can cry.
—Jean Rhys
Topics: Crying
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