In 1907, Ella Gwendoline (“Gwen”) Rees Williams sailed to England from Dominica, the Caribbean island where she was born, to attend school in Cambridge. Gwen, who was 16 years old, had long dreamed of the motherland, but from the moment she landed in Southampton, her mood began to darken. If London, her first stop, was sooty and drab and populated by permanently outraged landladies, school wasn’t much better. She was teased by her classmates for her melodious accent, who were especially pleased by the fact that the maniacal Mrs. Rochester is in Charlotte Brontë’s film jane eyre I was a white Creole like her. On Saturdays she cycled to the house of a kind great-aunt. Even here, however, the atmosphere was one of caution. Her aunt told her that she had once been planning to leave her husband for a lover, until she looked in the mirror and saw the devil peeking over her shoulder.
Has the devil ever landed on Gwen’s shoulder? Read Jean Rhys’s slyly compelling new biography of Miranda Seymour (the pseudonym was adopted in 1924, at the urging of his employer Ford Madox Ford) and you’ll feel like you sure did, usually more than once a year. However, unlike her aunt, she was not one to turn away from temptation. the author of journey in the dark Y good morning midnight it was all feeling: a human trifle zooming from one crisis to another, drawn not only by all the usual siren songs (men, money, booze), but by any number of other, less appealing tunes (“disaster is their element,” said its latest editor, Diana Athill). Was she, to use the old word, crazy? Sometimes maybe. But if she was like that, she wasn’t alone. used to live here once – the biography takes its brilliantly apt title from one of Rhys’s ghost stories, it’s full of madness. Half of the cast of him is half-crazy, and most of the rest are creepy as hell. Liars and swindlers, bigamists and hustlers, hustlers and gropers: they’re all here, though Seymour has a special line (because his subject appealed to them) in the kind of literary stalker whose pulse furtively quickens at the sight of an old lady in a bad wig, whiskey addiction and (just maybe) a half-finished manuscript in a drawer.
The fate of all this was cast on Rhys’ childhood on the island that inspired his 1966 jane eyre prequel, Wide Sargasso Sea. By then a British colony, of its population of 29,000, fewer than 100 were white (her mother, who spanked her until she was 12, was Creole; her father was Welsh), and she always felt like an outsider, “a changeling.” ”. , a ghostly apparition”. Dominica was not an entirely hospitable place for a girl like her, teased on the streets, that she felt at home. Voodoo was practiced and Rhys’s nanny spoke of zombies that could open any door, stories that foreshadowed the last years of her life when, figuratively speaking, there were reanimated corpses everywhere and the children of her Devon were after her as a witch. village.
After school, she became an actress; she once played a chicken, laying her egg to the bewildering thud of the clogs of the dissatisfied miners who watched. But her lack of talent meant that she soon needed a protector. Lancelot Gray Hugh Smith set her up in a flat and then paid for an abortion. But if he was never going to marry her, those who eventually did would never be as trustworthy as he was. Her first Belgian husband, Jean Lenglet, married her bigamously. Her second, Leslie Tilden-Smith, died suddenly. The third of them, Max Hamer, was sent to prison for fraud. Rhys had two brothers. The first, a boy, died as a baby while she was drinking. The second, a daughter, was originally sent by her itinerant parents and ruined to an orphanage. Meanwhile, the tiny, rat-infested places she called home (suburban bungalows with deceptively charming names) got worse and worse, as did her behavior. She slapped other tenants, shouted anti-Semitic slurs, and abused the kindness of those who cared for her.
All of this is exhausting to read: how he managed to write anything is a mystery. But somehow, she did. Rhys’s career splits in two. Encouraged by Ford, with whom he had an affair, he published his first novel, Quartetin 1928. Others followed, but after dismal reviews for good morning midnight in 1939, he was silent for 30 years. She was only saved by her ardent admirers: Francis Wyndham, then working at Andre Deutsch, and her colleague, Diana Athill, who between them, with the help of a priest who had previously been a chaplain of a nursing home, joked . wide coffinaso sea outside her
Some readers will enjoy when Rhys is in Paris, hanging out with notable bohemians. But it’s the second half of the book, in which she’s old and “insignificant” and half cut off, that’s Seymour’s triumph. The narrative has the tension of a thriller as Rhys struggles to finish. Wide Sargasso Sea, and once she’s been rediscovered, there are the shabby hotels she frequents; excursions with Sonia Orwell and Diana Melly; literary parasites asking for tea. Here’s the poet Al Alvarez flirting with her, and here’s the memoirist David Plante getting ready to stitch her up (the portrait of a drenched Rhys in his book Difficult Women It’s one of the scariest things I’ve ever read.
You can’t understand her: the violent ingratitude, the fondness for Ronnie Corbett, the fact that she read George Moore’s awful 1894 novel. Esther Waters 60 times And yet, Seymour does not make the mistake of portraying her as a victim (Rhys died in 1979, aged 88). As precarious as her existence is, as it appears in this biography, Rhys always maintains a dark hold, if not on herself, then on other people. Her intransigence, capriciousness and permanent selfishness may not be pleasant, but it is these qualities that kept her against all odds.