Jean Rhys ( ; born Ella Gwendoline Rees Williams; 24 August 1890 – 14 May 1979) was a British Creole novelist who was born and grew up in the Caribbean island of Dominica. From the age of 16, she resided mainly in England, where she was sent for her education. She is best known for her final novel, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), written as a prequel to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre.
Rhys started writing intermittently around 1914, and found a literary mentor in Ford Madox Ford (with whom she also had an affair) in 1923.(Angier 1990, pp. 39-47) With his assistance and encouragement, her first work of fiction—The Left Bank and Other Stories—was published in 1927. This was followed by four short semi-autobiographical novels about women navigating perilous circumstances across London and Paris: Quartet (1928), After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1931), Voyage in the Dark (1934), and Good Morning, Midnight (1939). After these publications failed to lead to significant financial or critical success, Rhys felt her writing career had stalled, and largely withdrew from public life.
Following the publication of Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys experienced a resurgence in popularity, and much of her earlier work was republished. Two further volumes of short stories followed, and her incomplete autobiography was published posthumously. In 1978, she was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for her writing,Malcolm and Malcolm, 1996 p. 132: Chronology just before her death in 1979.
Early life
Family heritage Rhys's father, William Rees Williams (b. 1853), was a Welsh ship's medical doctor when, at the age of 27, he arrived in Dominica.Seymour 2022, p. 4: "...William Rees Williams, was a Welshman with an Irish mother…" In 1882, a year after he was established on the island, he married Minna Williams, née Lockhart (b. 1853), a third-generation white Dominican Creole of Scots ancestry.Seymour 2022, p. 4: Rhys's mother Minna Lockhart, "a white Creole…had been born on Dominica".Angier 1990, p. 7: Rhys's "great-grandfather was a Scot, a cousin of Sir Walter Scott's biographer". And p. 9: William and Minna "married on January 10, 1882". ("Creole" was broadly used in those times to refer to any person born on the island, whether they were of European or African descent, or both.)Seymour 2022 p. 4: "Despite its pejorative sound" Creole refers to anyone, white, black or mixed heritage who was born on the island of Dominica. Rhys's maternal grandmother, born Jean Maxwell, may have had some Spanish ancestry.Angier 1990, p. 7: "the family story was that she was Spanish, or had some Spanish connection…"
Her mother's family had at one time been wealthy sugarcane plantation owners. Rhys's great-grandfather, James Potter Lockhart, had in 1824 purchased a 1,200-acre (485 hectares) estate that included 258 slaves.Angier 1990, p. 7.Seymour 2022, pp. 15–16. Rhys's cousins included mixed-race descendants of offspring that James Lockhart had sired with enslaved women.Seymour 2022, p. 7: James Potter Lockhart, Rhys's maternal great-grandfather "had taken two of his slaves as mistresses". Though slavery was abolished in 1834, Rhys's grandfather Edward Lockhart organized the brutal suppression of an 1844 rebellion by exploited black laborers.Seymour 2022, p. 17.Angier 1990, p. 7: On 1844 rebellion.
Five of the six children borne by Minna Williams survived to adulthood. Edward and Owen were the eldest. Third in birth order was Minna (named after her mother). Rhys was the fourth, called Gwen by her family, and born a year later. A fifth child, christened Brenda Gwenith, died in infancy. Brenda Clarice, born 1895, was the youngest of the five surviving children.Seymour 2022, p. 5: See footnote for clarification. Rhys's only reference to Brenda Gwenith occurs in her short story "Heat".Angier 1990, pp. 10–11: Seymour's biography disputes Angier's calculation that the deceased child was born before Rhys.
Class and race on Dominica At the time of Rhys's birth in 1890, Dominica had been a possession of the British Empire for almost 100 years. The white population on the island numbered 300, and the black and indigenous people numbered 30,000, many of them were formerly enslaved.Seymour 2022, p. 4: "By the close of the 19th century, when Dominica had almost 29,000 inhabitants, the island's white population had shrunk to fewer than a hundred."
The white colonial residents were strongly Anglophilic, though Rhys was herself of Welsh, Scottish and Irish background, rather than English.Angier 1990, pp. 5, 6. Rhys's father, Rees, was egalitarian in his medical practice, providing treatment to both white and black patients, and socialized with both rich and poor members of the community.Angier 1990, p. 17: See footnote: "...wouldn't take any payment from his poor patients." And p. 18.Seymour 2022, p. 9: Dr. Rees Williams treated white and black separately, but with "equal courtesy". While her father was content to see his daughter mix interracially, her mother Minna insisted she cultivate relationships with the well-to-do English children who visited the island. British subjects disparaged colonial whites, termed "Creoles"—identifiable by their distinctive accents.Seymour 2022, p. 19.
Primary education Rhys, after a late start, became an avid reader, a trait that her father's side of the family encouraged.Seymour 2022, pp. 20–21. Besides selections from the poetry from Byron and Milton, she read Treasure Island, Gulliver's Travels, and Robinson Crusoe.Seymour 2022, pp. 20–21: "...devoured the books" from her father's library.Angier 1990, p. 21: "She live for books in her imagination, and was wildly romantic." Her mother Minna was decidedly hostile to her daughter's interest in literature.Seymour 2022, pp. 21, 23. During this period, until the age of 12, Rhys was subject to beating with a whip administered by her mother, sometimes arbitrarily.Seymour 2022, pp. 21, 22–23: "The whipping were still in full force in 1902, when Gwen was twelve years old."Angier 1990, p. 24: See here for comments on the complexities of Rhys's relationship with her mother. The house servant, Meta, subjected her to cruel practical jokes.Angier 1990, p. 12. At the age of nine, Rhys was sent by her father to the Roseau Catholic convent as a day student.Seymour 2022, p. 23.
Schooling in England Rhys was educated in Dominica until the age of 16, when she was sent to England to live with an aunt, as her relations with her mother were difficult. 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. Unable to train as an actress and refusing to return to the Caribbean as her parents wished, Rhys worked with varied success as a chorus girl, adopting the names Vivienne, Emma, or Ella Gray. She toured Britain's small towns and returned to rooming or boarding houses in rundown neighbourhoods of London.Carr, Helen (2004). "Williams, Ella Gwendoline Rees (1890–1979)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press.Toynton 1992, p. 300: "Having grown up a middle-class doctor's daughter, she lived for much of her adult life on the margins of 'decent' society, first as a chorus girl and artist's model, then as a dependent on men she was sleeping with or was about to sleep with or had slept with at some point in the past…"
After her father died in 1910, Rhys appears to have experimented with living as an artist's model after she became the mistress of wealthy stockbroker Lancelot Grey Hugh Smith, whose father Hugh Colin Smith had been Governor of the Bank of England. Though 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.
During the First World War, Rhys served as a volunteer worker in a soldiers' canteen. In 1918, she worked in a pension office to help the families of dead or wounded soldiers and sailors.Seymour 2022, pp. 66-67: Rhys "volunteered to work long daily shifts at an army canteen that been set up at Euston Station.., over a period of almost two years [she] became a witness to the horrors of war." Composite quote.
Marriage and family In 1919, Rhys married Willem Johan Marie (Jean) Lenglet, a French-Dutch journalist, spy, and songwriter. He was the first of her three husbands. She and Lenglet lived in Paris, where their baby son died, then lived in Vienna and Budapest, before returning to Paris. Their daughter, Maryvonne Moerman (née Lenglet), was born in Ukkel, Belgium, in 1922.Angier 1990, p. 121: Maryvonne born 22 May 1922 in Ukkel, near Brussels.Seymour 2022, p. 91. Rhys left her two-week old daughter in a clinic at Ukkel when she went to London to procure money. It was not until November that she was able to retrieve Maryvonne. Refusing to put her daughter up for adoption, the girl was placed in a number of orphanages until she was reunited with her parents in 1927.Angier 1990, p. 124.Seymour 2022, pp. 121–122.Seymour 2022, p. 91: "The Lenglets reluctantly arranged for Maryvonne to be cared for at a series of baby shelters or orphanages…this seemingly heartless practice was not uncommon."
In 1924, the year that the newly named Jean Rhys was discovered and published by the English writer Ford Madox Ford, Lenglet was imprisoned for embezzlement. The couple eventually divorced in 1933, but remained loyal to each other's work, while sharing care of their daughter.
The next year, Rhys married Leslie Tilden-Smith, an English agent and editor.Seymour 2022, p. 145. In 1936, they went briefly to Dominica, the first time Rhys had returned since she had left for school.Seymour 2022, pp. 151–152.Angier 1990, pp. 350–358: See here for account of their visit to Dominica.
Her brother Owen was living in England, and she took care of some financial affairs for him, making a settlement with a mixed-race woman on the island and Owen's illegitimate children by her.Seymour 2022, p. 161. The visit exerted a powerful influence on Rhys's most famous novel, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966).
In 1937, Rhys began a friendship with novelist Eliot Bliss (who had adopted that first name in honour of an admired writer, T. S. Eliot).Seymour 2022, p. 168. The two women shared Caribbean backgrounds. The correspondence between them survives.McFarlin Library Retrieved 17 September 2015. Bliss is quoted on their relations in Alexandra Pringle's introduction to the 1984 reissue of Bliss's novel Luminous Isle: "She used to make me delightful West-Indian suppers, and we used to drink an awful lot. Well, she could hold it, but it used to make me ill, frequently ill. And she had a delightful husband who used to leave us, go out. Well, often he would come home and find us drunk. He once picked her off the floor. And he was furious if he found we'd drunk his wine." Rhys also became close to Phyllis Shand Allfrey, whose family also lived in Dominica.Angier 1990, p. 369: See footnote, summary of Allfrey relationship with Rhys.