Jean Rhys
Novelist · 1890–1979
Who is Jean Rhys?
Jean Rhys, born Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams on 24 August 1890 in Roseau, Dominica, was a West Indian novelist whose work is now central to Caribbean and modernist literature. The daughter of a Welsh doctor and a Dominican Creole mother, she was educated at the Roseau convent school before leaving for England at age sixteen, where she briefly trained as an actress and later moved to Paris. Encouraged by the English novelist Ford Madox Ford, she published her first collection, The Left Bank and Other Stories, in 1927, followed by a run of short semi-autobiographical novels: Quartet, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, Voyage in the Dark, and Good Morning, Midnight, all depicting women adrift and impoverished in London and Paris. After decades out of print and presumed by many to have died, she resurfaced in 1966 with Wide Sargasso Sea, a prequel to Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre that reimagines the "madwoman in the attic" as a Dominican Creole heiress, drawing directly on Rhys's own Caribbean upbringing. The novel won the W. H. Smith Literary Award and re-established her as a major twentieth-century writer. She died in Exeter, England, on 14 May 1979.
Sources: Britannica, "Jean Rhys" biography · Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) · University of the West Indies, Jean Rhys biographical notes (UWI Dominica Centre)