Jean Rhys (Lives of Modern Women) - Softcover

Angier, Carole

4.01

96 ratings by Goodreads

9780140080018: Jean Rhys (Lives of Modern Women)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140080015 ISBN 13: 9780140080018

Publisher: Penguin Books, 1986

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Examines the British writer's novels, short stories, and letters in order to understand the experiences and forces that shaped her life

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From Kirkus Reviews:

This detailed study of the author of Quartet and Wide Sargasso Sea seems not so much a biography as a collection of annotated note cards and unedited lecture notes. Rhys, born in 1890 in Dominica, the West Indies, had a Welsh father and a mother who was a Dominican Creole. The Creole influence would pervade her life and writing. At the age of 17, Rhys left Dominica to go to England, where she tried several careers--actor, chorus girl, artist's model--before she started to write. Her familiarity with the seedy side of London life is evident in her novels, many of which have the repeated theme of the helpless female, victimized by her dependence on a man for support and protection. Rhys had numerous love affairs throughout her long life; even at age 80, she enjoyed flirting with critic Alfred Alvarez, whose article about her in The New York Times Book Review on March 17, 1974, ``The Best Living English Novelist,'' made Rhys, briefly, a best seller. After several early novels such as After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1931) and Voyage in the Dark (1935), she stopped writing. Then she published Wide Sargasso Sea (1967), her story of the first marriage of Mr. Rochester of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. Many of Rhys's novels have autobiographical origins, and Angier, an English writer and teacher, seems determined to connect every inhalation in Rhys's life with an exhalation in one of her novels. Thus, the reader stumbles through explanatory parentheses (as many as six a page), interspersed with speculative phrases (``I think''; ``Did she know? I doubt very much''; ``Would she have? Surely not''). Perhaps Angier's exhaustive but unsorted research will be of value to some future biographer who will do justice to Rhys, a fine writer. -- Copyright �1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

In 1973 critic Al Alvarez called her the best living English novelist, and in the same year PW reported a "rush" on her novels, among them Quartet, Voyage in the Dark and her masterpiece, Wide Sargasso Sea. Rhys (1890-1979) was an odd bundle of qualities that included narcissism, paranoia, charm, self-pity, self-destructiveness, rage against men and a general wildness of temperament that owed something to the steamy island of Dominica where she was born. But as British freelance writer Angier amply shows in this hefty critical biography--where fact and insight lie cheek by jowl--she was adept at "distilling truth out of evasion and art out of pain." For her (and her heroines), loving meant losing, a lesson acquired through several marriages and passionate affairs, the most formative, from the literary point of view, with Ford Madox Ford. Perhaps this impressive study will trigger another rush on a poetic novelist now suffering a mild neglect. Photos.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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