Jean Rhys

Also known as

Jean Rhys, born Ella Gwendolyn Rees Williams in 1890, was a 20th-century novelist and writer of short stories. Born and raised on the Caribbean island of Dominica, she moved to England at age 16, became a chorus girl, and embarked on the life of a demimondaine there and in Europe. Her deep sense of being an outsider -- the descendant of white colonialists in the Caribbean, then a Creole in England -- never left her and deeply informed her work. Rhys's evocative sketches in the 1920s caught the eye, and briefly earned the patronage, of Ford Madox Ford (her fraught relationship with him is explored in her debut novel, Quartet [1928]). She is best known for her novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), which examined the character of Bertha Rochester (in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre) from a different angle.

Born 1890-08-24

Died 1979-05-14

Identifiers

• VIAF100237135
• ISNI0000000118278981
• WikidataQ230598
• Open LibraryOL4397788A

Top Subjects

• Fiction (2)
• West Indies (2)
• Caribbean Area (2)
• 20th century (2)
• Novelists, English -- 20th century -- Correspondence (2)
• Rhys, Jean -- Correspondence (2)
• Man-woman relationships (1)