Jean Rhys facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Jean Rhys CBE
Jean Rhys and Mollie Stoner in the 1970s
Born	(1890-08-24)24 August 1890 Roseau or Grand Bay, British Leeward Islands (now Dominica)
Died	14 May 1979(1979-05-14) (aged 88) Exeter, Devon, England
Occupation	Novelist, short story writer, essayist
Genre	Modernism, postmodernism
Notable works	Good Morning, Midnight Wide Sargasso Sea
Spouse	Jean Lenglet ​ ​ (m. 1919; div. 1933)​ Leslie Tilden-Smith ​ ​ (m. 1934; died 1945)​ Max Hamer ​ ​ (m. 1947; died 1966)​
Children	2

Jean Rhys (born Ella Gwendolyn Rees Williams; 24 August 1890 – 14 May 1979) was a British novelist. She was born and grew up on the Caribbean island of Dominica. When she was 16, she moved to England for her education and lived there for most of her life.

Jean Rhys is most famous for her novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). This book tells a story that happens before Charlotte Brontë's famous novel Jane Eyre. In 1978, she was given a special award, Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE), for her important writing.

Early Life and Education

Jean Rhys's father, William Rees Williams, was a doctor from Wales. Her mother, Minna Williams, was a Creole person born in Dominica, with Scottish family roots. The word "Creole" was used back then for anyone born on the island, no matter their background. Jean Rhys also had a brother. Her mother's family owned a large estate on the island.

Rhys went to school in Dominica until she was 16 years old. Then, she was sent to England to live with her aunt. She attended the Perse School for Girls in Cambridge. There, she felt like an outsider and was made fun of for her accent.

By 1909, she studied for a short time at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. Her teachers thought she would never learn to speak "proper English." They told her father to take her out of the school. Since she could not become an actress, and she did not want to go back to the Caribbean, she worked as a chorus girl. She used different names like Vivienne or Ella Gray. She traveled to small towns in Britain and lived in rooming houses in London.

During the First World War, Jean Rhys volunteered to work in a canteen for soldiers. In 1918, she worked in an office that handled pensions.

Family Life and Marriages

In 1919, Jean Rhys married Willem Johan Marie (Jean) Lenglet. He was a journalist from France and the Netherlands. He was her first of three husbands. Jean and Lenglet traveled around Europe. They had two children, but their son died when he was very young. They divorced in 1933, and their daughter mostly lived with her father.

In 1934, Rhys married Leslie Tilden-Smith, an editor from England. In 1936, they briefly visited Dominica. This was the first time Rhys had returned to her home island since she left for school. She found that her family's estate was not in good condition. She also helped her brother Oscar with some financial matters.

In 1937, Rhys became friends with another novelist, Eliot Bliss. Both women had Caribbean backgrounds. They wrote letters to each other, and these letters still exist today.

In 1939, Rhys and Tilden-Smith moved to Devon, where they lived for several years. Leslie Tilden-Smith passed away in 1945. In 1947, Rhys married Max Hamer, who was a lawyer and a cousin of her second husband. Max Hamer died in 1966.

Becoming a Writer

In 1924, Jean Rhys met the English writer Ford Madox Ford in Paris. Ford helped her with her writing. He saw that her experiences as someone living away from her home gave her a special way of looking at the world. He praised her unique writing style. Ford wrote in the introduction to her first collection of short stories, The Left Bank and Other Stories (1927), that she had a "terrifying insight" and spoke for those who were struggling.

It was Ford who suggested she change her name from Ella Williams to Jean Rhys. At that time, her husband was in jail for money problems.

Rhys moved in with Ford and his partner, Stella Bowen. She later wrote about her experiences during this time in her novel Quartet (1928). In this book, the main character, Marya Zelli, is a foreigner who feels lost when her husband is put in jail in Paris. The 1981 movie based on the novel starred famous actors like Maggie Smith and Alan Bates.

In her novel After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1931), Rhys continued to write about women who felt lost and mistreated. The main character, Julia Martin, is alone and spends her time in cafes and cheap hotels in Paris.

With Voyage in the Dark (1934), Rhys again wrote about a woman who felt rootless and mistreated. The story is told by Anna, a young chorus girl who grew up in the West Indies and feels out of place in England.

Good Morning, Midnight (1939) is often seen as a continuation of Rhys's earlier novels. In this book, she uses a special writing style called stream of consciousness. It shows the thoughts and feelings of an older woman named Sasha Jansen, who feels lost in Paris. This book was well-written but seemed sad. It came out when World War II started, and readers were looking for more hopeful stories. This seemed to be the end of Rhys's writing career for a while.

In the 1940s, Rhys mostly stayed away from public life. From 1955 to 1960, she lived in Bude, Cornwall, where she was not happy. She called it "Bude the Obscure." Later, she moved to Cheriton Fitzpaine, a small village in Devon.

After many years, Jean Rhys was "rediscovered" by Selma Vaz Dias. In 1949, Vaz Dias put an advertisement in a newspaper asking where Rhys was. She wanted to turn Rhys's novel Good Morning, Midnight into a radio play. Rhys replied, and they became good friends. Vaz Dias encouraged her to start writing again.

This encouragement led to the publication of her very famous novel Wide Sargasso Sea in 1966. Rhys wrote this book to tell the story of the woman Mr. Rochester married and kept hidden in his attic in Jane Eyre. The book won the important WH Smith Literary Award in 1967. In Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys wrote about power and relationships, especially in marriage. She showed the difficult relationship between an English man and a Creole woman from Dominica. The woman becomes powerless after being tricked by him and others. Rhys tells this woman's story from a very different point of view than in Jane Eyre.

Diana Athill and writer Francis Wyndham helped bring new attention to Rhys's work. Wide Sargasso Sea has been made into movies, operas, and radio plays.

In 1968, a collection of Rhys's short stories called Tigers Are Better-Looking was published. Some of these stories were new, and others were from her 1927 collection. Her 1969 short story "I Spy a Stranger" was made into a TV show in 1972 for the BBC. In 1976, another collection of her short stories, Sleep It Off Lady, was published. It included 16 stories written over many years.

Later Years and Death

From 1960 until she died, Rhys lived in Cheriton Fitzpaine in Devon. She once said it was "a dull spot." She was not very impressed by her late fame, saying, "It has come too late." In an interview shortly before she died, she wondered if any novelist could truly be happy for long.

Jean Rhys passed away in Exeter on 14 May 1979, at the age of 88. She had started writing her autobiography, but she died before finishing it. In 1979, the unfinished book was published after her death as Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography.

Legacy and Recognition

In 1974, a writer named A. Alvarez called Jean Rhys "quite simply, the best living English novelist" in a review.

Jean Rhys was given the award of CBE in 1978.

Australian filmmaker John Duigan directed a 1993 movie, Wide Sargasso Sea, based on Rhys's most famous novel.

The 2003 book and play After Mrs Rochester by Polly Teale is about the life of Jean Rhys and her book, Wide Sargasso Sea.

In 2012, English Heritage placed a blue plaque on her flat in Chelsea, where she once lived. This plaque marks places where famous people lived or worked.

In 2020, a pen that belonged to Jean Rhys was added to the Royal Society of Literature's collection.

See also

In Spanish: Jean Rhys para niños

Images for kids

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  Jean Rhys and Mollie Stoner in the 1970s