Jean Rhys's life is at least as worth examining as her novels. Think of a writer. She published four novels, and although they were praised by some critics, her books could not reach large audiences and were 'failed' by market standards. This resentful writer...
This resentful writer left everything behind and disappeared during the Second World War and was completely forgotten in the process. Years later, in 1958, her novel Good Morning, Midnight attracted great attention when it was radiophonized and broadcast on the BBC. Publishers and editors go after Rhys and find the author in her seventies in a coastal town with a finished novel and dozens of stories written. The finished novel is A Wide Wide Sea, and it caused quite a stir when it was published. In the same year, the author was given two of England's biggest literary awards.
Summary of life story
JEAN RHYS was born in the West Indies in 1890 as Ella Gwendolyn Rees Williams. She was sent to England at the age of 17 and studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts for a while. She started writing under the auspices of the British writer Ford Madox Ford, whom she met in Paris in 1924.
Jean Rhys (born Ella Gwendolyn Rees Williams; 24 August 1890 – 14 May 1979) was a British novelist who was born and grew up in the Caribbean island of Dominica. From the age of 16, she mainly resided in England, where she was sent for her education. She is best known for her novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), written as a prequel to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. In 1978, she was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire for her writing.
After her first storybook, she published the novels Postures (1928), After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1931), Voyage in the Dark (1934), and Good Morning, Midnight (1939).
Rhys, who lived a reclusive and poor life away from literary circles for years, finally published Wide Sargasso Sea, which she had been working on for a long time, in 1966. The highly praised book received the W H Smith Prize and the Heinemann Prize. Rhys died in Exeter in 1979.
Who is Jean Rhys?
The characters in the works of Jean Rhys, whose real name is Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams and who lived between 1890 and 1979 on the Dominican island of the Caribbean, bear traces of her own life. In her stories, Rhys describes the exhaustion of women who have given up existentially like herself. As the child of a Welsh doctor's father and an English-mixed mother of Scottish ancestry, Rhys fully experiences the discriminatory aspect of hybridity in Dominica.
In Cambridge, where she was sent to study at the age of 16, she was excluded as an unconventional foreigner of Dominican origin. She was expelled from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, which she managed to enter in 1909 to realize her dream of becoming an actress because she was a hopeless case. After all, as a Creole, she could not speak "proper English".
The women of Jean Rhys, who generally writes in the first person in her works, are women who talk to themselves, who do not talk to people even half as much as they talk to themselves, who turn to alcohol to escape from reality; They are women who are aware that the gap between rich and poor has never disappeared throughout human history and will never disappear, therefore they see themselves in the "oppressed" class, are humiliated and accept this situation, but despite everything, they adorn it with nobility and elegance.