Jean Rhys' native island of Dominica and her Creole heritage were strong influences on the writer's work. Her complicated and difficult life was very much connected to and revealed in the stories she wrote. Her female protagonists are often Creole women in socially subordinate positions, beholden to men; they are women who live on the margins of life.
Background
Ella Gwendolen Rhys Williams was born in Roseau, Dominica, on August 24, 1890. Her father, Rhys Williams, was a London-educated Welsh doctor, and her mother, Minna Lockhard, was a third-generation Dominican Creole from an established slave-owning family.
Education
Even though her family was Anglican, she was educated in a convent school and found the rituals and the non-segregated seating within the Catholic Church remarkable. These experiences, later found in her work, were enhanced by her exposure to the language of Patois (a blend of the regional dialect and English), and to the African religious rituals gained through her interaction with servants and the black women who raised her. Her biographers describe her deep attraction to Dominica's black culture and to the contrasts she observed between her Creole life and that of the island's black natives, all of which made her feel uncertain about her identity.
In 1907 Rhys went to live with her aunt Clarice Williams in England and con-tinued her education at the Perse School, where her Creole background caused clashes with intolerant classmates. However, even at that time, she was already exhibiting an uncanny ability in writing. In 1909, interested in pursuing an acting career, she transferred to the Academy of Dramatic Art. Shortly thereafter, her father died and she dropped out of school and worked as a chorus girl for two years under the names of Emma or Ella Gray. During this period she began her lifelong habit of drinking and took numerous odd jobs to make ends meet. She worked as an artist's model and posed for advertisements. Her experiences and relationships during this time provided material that she would write about later: "During this period Rhys lived with women who eventually served as prototypes for characters in her books: disenfranchised women who depended financially on men, fatalistic and satiric . . . whose slang drew Rhys to them".
Career
Her first writing came from the notes she kept describing her feelings when her affair with upper-class Englishman Lancelot Hug Smith ended. Even though she stored these notes for many years, they eventually provided the material for Voyage in the Dark (1934).
In 1917, and for the next ten years, she embarked on a characteristically unsettled life, traveling throughout cities in Europe. In London she met and soon thereafter married (1919) Jean Lenglet, a man of French and Dutch descent. Lenglet wrote under the name of Edouard de Neve and delved into painting and singing as well. After living in Holland for two years, Rhys and Lenglet moved to Paris, where their son was born. He died a few weeks later. Even though Rhys was still not a recognized author, she continued writing diaries, and accounts of her son's life and death would later appear in her autobiographical novels After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1930) and Good Morning, Midnight (1939).
Unknownst to Rhys, her husband, who had left for Vienna, had become involved in clandestine espionage activities. She worked as an English tutor and later, after joining her husband in Vienna, worked as an interpreter dealing in black-market currency exchange, a job that for a short time provided the couple with a very good income. From there, the couple traveled to Budapest, but left after Lenglet's espionage activities were uncovered. In 1922 a daughter was born in Brussels, and with her they returned to Paris, where Lenglet, who by now was involved in the buying and selling of improperly obtained art, was arrested and imprisoned. "Vienne," published as part of a series of stories that were inspired by her experiences during these years, captures the restlessness of the time she traveled throughout Europe.
In 1924, in serious financial difficulty and with her husband still in prison, Jean Rhys met British author Ford Madox Ford, editor of the Transatlantic Review. As Ford's protégé, Rhys became acquainted with other expatriate writers in Europe, including Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway. What had started out as a mentoring relationship where Ford introduced Rhys to other writers, published some of her stories and helped her in her writing turned into a short-lived, abusive ménage a trois with him and his live-in mistress. It was a devastating time in Rhys' life, compounded by the breakup of her marriage to Lenglet, who had discovered the nature of her relationship with Ford. During this time Rhys worked on the translation of a novel and completed her own first novel, Quartet (1929). This novel marks the first appearance of the characteristic heroine who returns in other works, a sensitive and vulnerable, sexually attractive, and eventually, self-defeated woman. The story line of the novel came from the devastating relationship she had with Ford and the earlier breakup with Lancelot Smith. It is interesting to note that there was not much critical acclaim for this work, and a recent biographical essay suggests her isolation "from the intellectual and literary sources of modernism, along with her position as an economically and culturally disenfranchised woman, may partially explain the longtime critical neglect of her work".
In 1934 published her most autobiographical novel, Voyage in the Dark. In 1939 she published Good Morning, Midnight. Smith died in 1945, and she married his cousin Max Hamer. Her personal and professional life began to decline at that time due to severe depression and problems with alcohol. Interest in Rhys' work surfaced in 1957 when the BBC radio aired an adaptation of her novel Good Morning, Midnight. A contract from a publishing company followed and for the next six years she worked on Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), considered her masterpiece. She died in 1979 while still working on the story of her life, which was eventually published as Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography in 1979.
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 wandered through Europe, living mainly in London, Paris and Vienna. They had two children, a son who died young and a daughter. They divorced in 1933.
The next year she married Leslie Tilden-Smith, an English editor. In 1937 she began a friendship with the novelist Eliot Bliss, who shared her Caribbean background. The correspondence between them survives.
In 1939 Rhys and Tilden-Smith moved to Devon, where they lived for several years. He died in 1945. In 1947 Rhys married Max Hamer, a solicitor who was a cousin of Tilden-Smith. He was convicted of fraud and imprisoned after their marriage. He died in 1966.