Jean Rhys
| Jean Rhys | |
|---|---|
_with_Mollie_Stoner,_Velthams,_1970s_B.jpg)
Jean Rhys and Mollie Stoner in the 1970s
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| Born |
24 August 1890 Roseau, Dominica, British West Indies |
| Died | 14 May 1979 (aged 88) Exeter, Devon, England |
| Occupation | Novelist, short story writer, essayist |
| Nationality | Dominican |
| Genre | Modernism, postmodernism |
| Notable works | |
| Spouse |
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| Children | A son and a daughter by Lenglet |
Jean Rhys, CBE (/ˈdʒiːn riːs/; 24 August 1890 – 14 May 1979), born Ella Gwendolyn Rees Williams, was a mid-20th-century novelist who was born and grew up in the Caribbean island of Dominica, though she was mainly resident in England from the age of 16. She is best known for her novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), written as a prequel to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre.
Rhys was born in Roseau, the capital of Dominica, an island in the British West Indies. Her father, William Rees Williams, was a Welsh doctor and her mother, Minna Williams, was a third-generation Dominican Creole of Scots ancestry. ("Creole" was broadly used in those times to refer to any person born on the island, whether they were of white or mixed blood.)
Rhys was educated in Dominica until the age of 16, when she was sent to England to live with an aunt. She attended the Perse School for Girls in Cambridge, where she was mocked as an outsider and for her accent. She attended two terms at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London by 1909. Her instructors despaired of her ever learning to speak "proper English" and advised her father to take her away. Now unable to train as an actress and refusing to return to the Caribbean as her parents wished, she worked with varied success as a chorus girl, adopting the names Vivienne, Emma or Ella Gray.
After her father died, in 1910, Rhys appeared to have experimented with the prospect of living as a demimondaine. She became the mistress of a wealthy stockbroker, Lancelot Grey Hugh ("Lancey") Smith. Though he was a bachelor, Smith did not offer to marry Rhys and their affair soon ended. However, he continued to be an occasional source of financial help. Distraught by events, including a near-fatal abortion (not Smith's child), Rhys began writing and produced an early version of her novel Voyage In The Dark. In 1913 she worked for a time as a nude model in Britain.
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