Miranda Seymour’s “slyly compelling” biography of the novelist Jean Rhys is “shot through with madness,” “Half its cast are half crazy”— Rhys included—and “most of the rest are as creepy as hell.” Rhys (1890–1979) is best known for Wide Sargasso Sea, a 1966 novel that capped the British septuagenarian’s late-in-life rediscovery. But she had gained ardent supporters with four novels from the 1920s and ’30s that featured female protagonists who were as alienated as their creator. Born in Dominica, she was whipped at home by her mother and taunted on the streets for being white, then ostracized for her island accent when she moved to London at 16. Later, she lived a patchwork adulthood bouncing between unreliable lovers and husbands. “Quite how she managed to write anything at all is a mystery.”
Rhys comes across as “a flawed woman who, though repeatedly bowed, refused to be broken,” As a failed actress turned chorus girl, she became the mistress of a stockbroker who paid for her to have an abortion. Her first husband turned out to be a bigamist and she had one child die in infancy. Novelist Ford Madox Ford, another lover, championed her early novels, the ones featuring outsiders who “feel real because Rhys imbued them with her own lived experiences.” Rhys also suffered from mental illness, and was prone to angry outbursts and unjustifiable betrayals. Still, “it is hard not to cheer for her when she achieves overdue success.”
“Why did people support this difficult woman?” asked Mary Ann Gwinn in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Seymour writes that Rhys was “an enchantress” when she wasn’t raging or drinking. In Wide Sargasso Sea, she reconsidered a character from Jane Eyre, turning the so-called madwoman in the attic into a figure of sympathy, With this biography, Seymour does Rhys a similar favor: sending readers back to the novelist’s fiction “with fresh insight and enhanced admiration.”
0
0
Average Rating