Meet the writers: Jean Rhys
Jean Rhys (1890-1979) is reported to had been a reclusive, self-destructive woman; nevertheless, she is also well-known as the most important writer from Dominica, one of the islands that made the so-called West Indies.
Jean Rhys was, in fact, the pen name of Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams, born in Roseau, Dominica, from a Welsh doctor and one of the daughters of the Lockhart family, longstanding Dominican Creoles. She was educated at the Convent School in her hometown and left for England when she was sixteen years old. She went into the theatre for a short time but began writing in 1922, publishing her first book in 1927. By then she had married a Dutch poet, the first of her three husbands, and lived a rootless wandering life in Europe mainly in London, Paris and Vienna. Her early novels and short stories reflect this lifestyle. She only returned to Dominica once, in 1936.
Her literary triumph was the novel “Wide Sargasso Sea” published in 1966, after a long period of reclusion by the author. It won several literary awards, and which, like parts of her other books, drew on her memories of Dominica. “Wide Sargasso Sea” is a brilliant novel inspired by Charlotte Brönte’s “Jane Eyre”, through the eyes of Bertha Mason, one of Brönte’s characters - but now set in the West Indies. She died in Devon, England, on May 14, 1979.
