![]() ![]() ![]() The books went out of print and she disappeared from the literary scene into a sort of self-imposed obscurity. Rhys’s early work was well received but hardly best-selling. ![]() The Caribbean, for the most part, is distant and idealised, an exotic memory which accentuates the sadness of the present. ![]() Her short stories and novels from the 1920s and 1930s are mostly set in Paris and London and deal with cheap hotels, ephemeral relationships and betrayal. During that time she adopted the pen name Jean Rhys. She stayed, married a Dutch poet and spent the 1920s writing and, by all accounts, drinking in the cultural capitals of Europe. Francis Wyndham, the novelist and adviser to her publisher, André Deutsch, wrote of her as “the late Jean Rhys”.īorn in Dominica in 1890 to a Welsh doctor and a white West Indian mother, Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams came to England in 1907 to finish her education. Her brief and notoriously Bohemian literary career, it seemed, had ended with Good Morning, Midnight, published in 1939. In the 1950s she had become a near recluse and was widely believed to have died, either during the Second World War or in a sanatorium. The publication of Wide Sargasso Seain 1966 was, almost literally, a return from the dead for its 76-year-old author, Jean Rhys. ![]()
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