Jean Rhys: Life and Work - Hardcover

Angier, Carole

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0316042633 ISBN 13: 9780316042635

Publisher: Little, Brown, 1990

Synopsis

Traces the life of the British novelist, discusses the influence of her life on her writing, and examines each of her five novels

About this title

Reviews

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.

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.

Rhys (1890-1979), author of several novels and short stories, drew on her life experience as a colonial exile from the British West Indies who became a chorus girl, bohemian, and writer living by her wits in London and Paris. Angier (who previously published a much shorter biography, Jean Rhys , Viking, 1986) painstakingly links Rhys's difficult life to events and characters in her fiction. Angier's exhaustive study is exacting, though not without speculation. She pays special attention to Rhys's autobiographical tendencies, especially in light of her heroines and their alienation. This intimate yet scholarly work is much more than simple biography, providing a detailed and well-documented analysis of the writings. Recommended for academic and large public libraries.
- Janice Braun, Medical Historical Lib., Yale Univ.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Little, Brown
• Publication date: 1990
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0316042633
• ISBN 13: 9780316042635
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 762