Jean Rhys

Ella Gwendolyn Rees Williams was born in 1890 to a Welsh doctor and a Creole woman of Scots ancestry on the Caribbean island of Dominica (then a British colony). At sixteen she was sent to England, where she studied to be an actress. Williams was ostracized for her Caribbean heritage and accent—she was eventually taken out of school because her instructors deemed her unable to rid herself of the West Indies accent that would prevent her from gaining significant stage roles. She then lived in Britain for nearly a decade, surviving on small acting roles and chorus parts. After having a near-fatal abortion paid for by a former lover, Williams began to write. In 1924, in the midst of a tumultuous marriage, Williams made the acquaintance of the acclaimed English novelist Ford Madox Ford. Ford took her in as both a protégé and mistress, suggesting that she change her name to Jean Rhys and eventually facilitating the publication of her work, which often dealt with her own experiences of alienation as a woman at the hands of unjust lovers and an exclusionary society. The three major novels that Rhys produced during the 1930s—After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, Voyage in the Dark, and Good Morning, Midnight—were met with mixed critical success. It wasn’t until 1966 (after several decades of anonymity marked by two more marriages and an increasingly serious alcohol problem) that Rhys published Wide Sargasso Sea and rocketed to literary fame. Wide Sargasso Sea remains her most acclaimed work, having garnered her several major literary awards and a place in the canon of postcolonial literature in English. Rhys died in 1979, in Exeter, U.K.