Jean Rhys hated England although she spent most of her life here. Born to a Welsh father and Creole mother she spent her childhood in the West Indies. Moving to England at 16, she would never forget the shock of the cold.
The sense of being an outsider also never left her – it informs all her work; that work speaking to anyone who has ever felt that way themselves.
Her most famous and last novel ‘Wide Sargasso Sea’ is a prequel to Charlotte Bronte’s ‘Jane Eyre’ (one of the most famous books in the English literary canon). Rhys takes the figure of ‘the madwoman in the attic’, Rochester’s first mad wife and puts her centre stage, telling the story of her early life, as if it were hidden behind the earlier text.
This book’s creation is as remarkable a tale. Rhys kept fragments of the text stored in an old box under her bed, struggling for years with its composition. Amid this sea of paper, she somehow miraculously managed to conjure one of the great novels of the 20th century.
One can draw a comparison between these scraps of paper to Rhys’s own fragmented and chaotic life – finally only her writing bringing a sense of order.
Struggling with alcoholism, three failed marriages and numerous abandonments and disappointments, Rhys’s life experience informs her early semi-autobiographical novels. My favourite of which is ‘Good Morning, Midnight’.
‘Quite like old times,’ the room says. ‘Yes? No?’
This is the opening – a line that has always stayed with me. I recall it whenever I stay in a cheap hotel or rented room. ‘Good Morning, Midnight’ is the novel of such rooms, set in the underworld of 1930’s Paris. It is an unforgettable carousel of shabby bars and shabbier men, in Rhys’s spare yet poetic prose.
It is a truly moving work. Equally moving, is this rare snatch of Rhys’s actual voice, speaking of that life:
