Jean Rhys : Life and Work

by Carole Angier

'An acute literary intelligence ... the reader comes to trust instinctively Angier's assessments.' New York TimesJean Rhys (1890-1979) had a long life of great difficulty. So inept was she in its management that her authority as the writer of five beautifully shaped and controlled novels appears how could someone so bad at living be so good at writing about it?Carole Angier answers this question. Jean Rhys never denied that she used her ownexperience in her writings, but no one hitherto has understood so well the nature of, andreasons for, this use.On her way to understanding, Carole Angier discovered more about the life thanseemed possible. Jean Rhys's childhood, her momentous first love affair, her three marriages, the disasters which befell her husbands, her drinking and its all are shown with unsparing clarity. Equally clearly, and more importantly, we see the dynamics of her personality as it underwent, and sometimes provoked, these experiences. Sometimes what is revealed is shocking; but Carole Angier's sympathy and compassion dispel dismay, and her brilliant demonstrations of how art was made of events and emotions restores admiration on foundations which are stronger than ever.Jean Rhys did not want anyone to write about her, but this first full biography put beyond question her standing as a great writer of our time, written with an intensity and clarity which mirrors her own. It is a work of exceptional intimacy, sensitivity and power.'Remarkable, the definitive biography. It is deeply researched, subtle, sympathetic.'Claire Tomalin Independent on Sunday'Mesmerising.' Washington Post

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, Biography Memoir, Literature, History, British Literature, Literary Fiction

784 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1985

About the author

Carole Angier is the award-winning biographer of Jean Rhys (1985 & 1990). Her biography of the great Italian writer Primo Levi was published in the UK and the US in 2002 to critical acclaim. Carole was a teacher for many years before taking the plunge into full-time writing, teaching all forms of English (literature, creative writing, expository writing) for many institutions, including ten years as a tutor with the Open University. She also speaks Italian, French and German, though Carole says that she would not dare to write in them.

Reviews

[Paul Bryant · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a peculiarly honest and an honestly peculiar biography about the reigning queen of all female miserablists and for JR fans who don’t know about it, when you get hold of a copy it will be like you died and went to miserable heaven. All the angels with their harps busted and boohooing and drinking gin and bitching about God. (“Never mind his Son”).

Carole Angier is very forthright about what she doesn’t know, which is a real lot. She weaves the tale together with JR’s own very autobiographical stories and novels (plus unfinished autobiography called Smile Please, a very Rhysian title). Then since JR knocked around with other literary scribblers, their writings go into the mix. It gets completely ludicrous – at one point (1924) Jean was married to a guy who was in prison for theft and embezzlement, living with Ford Madox Ford and his wife, having a blatant affair with Ford, and ALL FOUR of them later wrote accounts of the period (three novels, one memoir), all of which try to blame each other for the interpersonal hideousness.

But very frequently Carole Angier will write “I think Jean moved back to Paris” or “I think Jean must have stopped seeing him by then” – she makes her best guess and tells the reader it is a guess, which is what most biographers do not do. In fact I would have thought Biographer Rule Number One is “Don’t let them realise how little you actually know”. Carole Angier breaks this rule every five pages.


THE VOICE OF JEAN RHYS

This comes up again and again. She got into drama school but they said she could never go on the stage unless she dropped her horrible accent. They said she talked like a black person. And also in a high strangulated annoying manner. She was born in Dominica, in the West Indies. Her family was the least posh of the rich white plantation owning ruling class, but least posh was still rich white. I wanted to hear what she sounded like, and did all rich white West Indians talk like black people? How curious. But after years in England and France, she learned to speak very quietly, and the only recording of her I could find betrays none of these grating qualities, in fact she has a nice voice :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UN_6xJ...

In this bit she says she never could write about being happy. And she doesn't believe anyone is happy for very long. Well, she would say that.


Anyway, this is recommended to the teeny hard core of JR fans who haven't already read it.

[Paul Bryant · Rating 4 out of 5]

I forgot to list this one. Jean Rhys would have smiled grimly and muttered oh well, that's about par for the course, everybody did. For someone always on the verge of total collapse she led a long life - 1890 to 1979. In fact she lived long enough to meet Leonard Cohen. I'd have paid good money to witness that.



or maybe Ingmar Bergman




or Samuel Beckett



But miserable drunken old bat or not, you gotta read at least one of her gloomfests. Or two. Maybe three. Go on, read the whole lot, there aren't many and they're mercifully short.

[Bloodorange]

I intend to read through it section by section, in the order I will find most convenient (Wide Sargasso Sea sections first, then Good Morning, Midnight, then Quartet, then probably chronologically).

Table of Contents:

Part one: Life, 1890-1927
* Dominica, 1890-1907 - traces the connections between Jean's birthplace, her family history, and her writing.
First steps, 1907-1912 (NOW READING)
The interval, 1913-1919
John, 1919-1924
Ford, 1924-1927
Quartet


Part two: Work, 1928-1939
Leslie, 1928-1930
After leaving Mr Mackenzie
Leslie, 1931-1934
Voyage in the dark
Leslie, 1935-1939
* Good morning, midnight - With its analysis of themes of vision, hatred as a quintessential part of self in a Rhys' heroine, humour, and the complete ineffectiveness of Sasha's actions (even intentions), this chapter is making me appreciate things I failed to appreciate in GMM (and the name is llegion). Not as complex or well structured as essay on WSS, in my opinion, but very useful if you work on GMM.

Part three: The lost years, 1939-1966
War, 1939-1945
Max, 1945-1957
* The writing of Wide Sargasso Sea, 1957-1966 - very suspenseful; writer's block, illness, alcoholism, old age. This part is really intense, and involves Rhys neglecting or hitting her invalid husband to vent her frustration that because of him (and many other factors, to be truthful), her writing does not get done. And the story of her greedy literary agent? A veritable thriller!
* Wide Sargasso Sea - a very good, systematic analysis of WSS; can be too biographical to some (Antoinette's emotional problems are invariably said to reflect Jean's problems. Which might be true, but repeated ad nauseam. Still, such is the biographer's prerogative.)


Part four: The last years, 1966-1979
Life, 1966-1975
Death, 1976-1979
J

[C.S. Burrough · Rating 5 out of 5]

Having read the thin earlier version and this subsequent thick-as-a-brick edition, I strongly recommend the latter if time is on your side.

Life was brutal to Jean Rhys, and she let us know it in her deliciously wry, self-deprecating, sometimes hilarious way. Her incompetence at life was magnificently offset by her profound talent for expressing and rationalising that experience so succinctly in writing. Hence her being described by one literary contemporary as 'one of the finest British writers of this century'.

Some Rhys devotees are prone to the notion that there sits within each of us a 'touch of the Jean Rhys'. Such aficionados may argue that Jean's critics are merely expressing their own insecurities, displaying denial of their own vulnerabilities, by deriding Jean's absurdist take on life.

Indeed, Rhys detractors who have tagged her work a 'gloomfest' seem simply out of their depth to her adherents.

But frivolous pulp fiction was just not her brand; she would rather have starved (and almost did). She wrote not for the light entertainment of the masses. Her artistry remains, in parts, heartbreakingly beautiful. Her 'underdog' themes remain universal. Her poignant narrative is timeless, despite the evocative sense of the times she lived and wrote in (born 24 August 1890 – died 14 May 1979).

With a rare compassion, Carole Angier explores Rhys's fin de siècle white West Indies childhood, her time as an Edwardian London chorus girl, her devastating first love affair with one of England's wealthiest men, her bohemian life in 1920s Rive Gauche Paris, her all-too-fleeting 'money phase' in post WWI Vienna, her three bizarre marriages and the misfortune awaiting her husbands.

We understand Jean's loathing of the cold, grey early 20th century England she was sent to as a teenager, seen through her Caribbean-creole lens.

We feel for her in Holloway jail in middle-age, empathise with her being forgotten and thought dead by the literary world after going out of print in WWII.

We despair at the run-down country shacks she inhabited in her solitary, dirt poor old age prior to the chance rediscovery and wide acclaim leading to her CBE (of which she remarked drily: 'It came too late').

Here was an alien who never quite adjusted but could never turn back. Forever displaced. We explore her compulsive drinking and its short- and long-term effects on herself and those around her.

The biography examines every Rhys work published, chapter and verse, plus much of what she wrote but did not publish. It analyses Jean's distinctive deep and narrow themes, her instinctive sense of form and astonishing use of imagery. It documents how each story and episode mirrors her own history.

It's always great finding a biographer who loves and understands her subject as passionately as you do. But nor does Angier balk at calling a spade a spade when it comes to Jean's glaring character flaws. I felt Angier's lay psychoanalysis went into overreach. I disagreed with certain of her secondhand findings. But I remained hooked and fascinated.

My strongest issue is her coverage of Wide Sargasso Sea. As maddening as Rhys herself in tainting her exquisite body of work with this conceptually anomalous novel (loathed beyond words by some devotees), Angier allocates it an exasperating 42-page analysis chapter.

As Wide Sargasso Sea remains my one Rhys bugbear, Angier's ramblings on it just reawakened the torment. As with the novel, I climbed walls getting through this dissertation on it. The biographer pithily concedes that: "Some readers may feel, on the contrary, that Wide Sargasso Sea is too full of incident, that it is a Caribbean 'Gothic Novel', too close for comfort to melodrama" [p 556]. That tokenistic nod to us is frustrating. With critics and biographers duty bound to some modicum of objectivity, here we instead get just Angier's gushing subjectivity on the often-contentious topic of Wide Sargasso Sea.

(Angier at least explains why she admits this novel's Part Two is not 'quite' as successfully executed as it could be, though that's little consolation if you feel the novel has no place in Rhys's body of work.)

Naturally, those on the opposite side of the Sargasso Sea opinion divide will revel in this chapter I despaired of. But those who disfavour the novel care not that it was Rhys's most commercially successful piece, the one to reawaken her in the public eye after decades of obscurity, making her briefly a bestselling phenomenon on the eve of her death, then a global industry posthumously. We care not for its raft of commercially driven awards. Or for the hoi polloi romance readers' accolades of it being the Rhys 'masterpiece'. This group likely never read or understood her wider, defining body of work.

Regardless, this chapter's academic relevance is incontestable for students of Rhys literature, who should read other opinions for comparison anyway. My differing with its overall take on Sargasso is merely opinion and taste.

Since first reading Jean Rhys: Life and Work, I have returned to it numerous times after reading other works seemingly inspired by it, most notably Lillian Pizzichini's wonderful The Blue Hour (2009). There is always something I had not fully digested previously. Incomparable in length and coverage, Angier's work remains the definitive Rhys biography, well deserving its 1991 Whitbread Biography Award shortlisting, and winning of the 1991 Writers' Guild Award for Non-Fiction.

Not to be missed. Stock up on gin and luminal. Draw shut the curtains. You won't move until you've read every word.

[Karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rhys never wanted a biography written of her, so this is styled as a "study," which seems a little coy, but oh well. Angier doesn't try to keep her tone objective; she clearly loves Rhys's work and has immense sympathy for her troubles in life.

And Rhys did have a very troubled life. She had terrible love affairs with men, terrible marriages, terrible bouts of poverty and illness and drinking... In between, she wrote stories and novels that wrenched out some of her pain (but never enough.)

I've only read Wide Sargasso Sea, her most famous book, which is about the first Mrs. Rochester, the madwoman in the attice in Jane Eyre. Like Mrs. Rochester/Antoinette, Rhys grew up as a white West Indian, was brought to England where she knew no one, and had disastrous encounters with English men. Unlike Antoinette, Rhys didn't end up locked in anyone's attic...but Angier gives the sense that she came close.

A sad book, but also a testament to Rhys's seriousness as an artist. Her indecision and self-doubt about even her greatest works casts them in a fascinating light. There's a sense about printed books, especially more or less canonized ones, that they must have emerged fully formed and bathed in golden heavenly light, with "GENIUS" stamped across them in godscript. It's sort of heartening and sort of disconcerting to realize that many of them have the same miserable origins as lesser works.

RIP, Jean Rhys.

[Frederike · Rating 5 out of 5]

The relationship between the loneliness Jean Rhys herself experienced and that of her heroines is clearly described and elaborated upon in this study

[John Stiles · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this book interesting, so much so that I also read the earlier edition of this same volume which was a much thinner book, a kind of sampler of the 770 pg later volume which I finished in one sitting.

I found out about Jean Rhys in Halifax Nova Scotia, in the 1990's, when I went into what was then the Trident Bookstore/Coffee Shop and asked the bookseller if he had a book by a female version of JD Salinger. "No," he said "but you might like this". He passed me After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie. It is my favourite book, the one I always go to when people ask because it deals with the basics in life for an artist, in this case it is a lonely dance hall girl who is losing her looks and struggling to survive financially.
What was interesting about the two versions of the bios was I thought the writer might be lazy and simply use the chapter intros from the slimmer volume and then pad the book with anecdotes and more filler but she completely re-wrote the whole thing chapter by chapter and I found that admirable and also fascinating. However on a technical note I think the earlier slimmer volume tried to imitate Rhys’ spare writing style and for that reason, I would say it is a more true book to her. That's just my opinion. I've always had a thing for old ladies. So now you know.

[Ruth · Rating 5 out of 5]

This biography seems a great achievement on Angier's part: it weaves together scraps of information from letters, interviews and Jean Rhys's novels, stories and diaries, yet manages to be a very thorough study of its subject. Sometimes, especially when Angier analyses Rhys' writing, it reads like a dissertation, but it is very well written. I don't often commit to reading such a long book, but I am a great fan of Jean Rhys' work and this is even more true now. Rhys was an incredibly difficult person, but wrote beautifully; knowing how difficult it was for her to manage this, because of her personal problems, disorganisation and money worries, makes me appreciate her talent even more.

[Jennie Rogers · Rating 4 out of 5]

Knocking a star off because in the last chapter Angier feels the need to diagnose Rhys. Bad approach & it left a bad taste in mouth. Other than that bad bit what a wonderfully detailed exploration both of Rhys' writing and her life. Bravo, I'm happy this exists.

[Kallie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Angier does a very good job of getting across the main dynamic of Rhys' life, what motivated her to write in fact how the act of writing was a means of survival for her. What comes across is a woman who otherwise felt helpless to deal with how harsh the world was, on powerless single women of her era. Rhys did not become angry experiencing this so much as despairing and needy, and who can blame her. What she salvaged from this life, her very simple, evocative writing style, is a treasure for us all. I never tire of her books. She is simply one of the best writers in the English language ever.

[Rimgailė 🤓 · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've read this after Wide Sargasso Sea because I wanted to explore and analyse a bit furter. Carole Angier tells the life of Jean Rhys through her novels and her main heroines. It seems that Jean Rhys was living a tragic life that was always led by sadness.
This book is mainly for those who want research Jean Rhys and her works as well as her personality. Although, I think that it was not quite fulfilled.

[Margaux Tatin Blanc]

As I am reading at the same time this book and a bio of Patricia Highsmith, i discovered that the same publisher/editor Francis Wydham had been essential in the new trend and recognition of Jean Rhys in the 1970s as well as the European recognition of Patricia Highsmithas who was very poorly considered in the US at the time...
So strange...

[Amy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Didn’t finish. This was difficult to read. Way too many excerpts from books and too much French with no translation (not even in footnotes).

[Ruth · Rating 4 out of 5]

You have to be a big fan of Rhys' work to read this. A lot of it is an exposition of general themes in the books. Reminiscent of a paper you might write for a Master's thesis, but much better. Very well written, in fact. It's a long book and I read it all (often I give up). Lots of interesting tidbits covering much of Rhys' life. Made it easier to understand her work, yet to sort of like it less. Because she really was an irresponsible, self-centered person. Maybe she would today be considered mentally ill. Her work, though....it's good, I think, and you can't go judging an artist by the way her life is lived. You couldn't like anyone.

[Mahjong_kid · Rating 3 out of 5]

This brief biography of Jean Rhys offers insight into both her life and the way that she used her writing to examine her life experiences. I only wish I had read it sooner, in tandem with my study of Wide Sargasso Sea, as I would have better understood some of the characters' underlying motivations.

Having read this book, I'd be interested in seeking out a more comprehensive biography and probably, as well, her unfinished autobiography.

[Phyllis]

thin book

[David]

Terrifying. It's a miracle that Rhys ever finished anything, let alone published it. A portrait of a talented and tortured soul who somehow managed to wrestle out of a chaotic, fractured life, an integrated, coherent body of fiction.