Jean Rhys

Jean Rhys was born in Dominica in 1894, where she spent her childhood. Her father was a Welsh doctor, and her mother was Creole. At the age of sixteen, she moved to England, where she remained until World War I. After her father's death, she worked various jobs—as a dancer, mannequin, and model—and began writing in the 1920s after her first marriage to a Dutch poet ended. For ten years, she lived in Vienna and Paris, where she met Ford Madox Ford, who wrote an enthusiastic review of her first book, the short story collection "The Left Bank," published in 1927. This was followed by "Quartet" (1928), "After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie" (1930), "Voyage in the Dark" (1934), and "Good Morning, Midnight" (1939). None of these achieved significant commercial success, perhaps because their themes and writing style were decades ahead of their time. After the outbreak of the war and the subsequent failure of "Good Morning, Midnight," her work fell into obscurity. Everyone believed she was dead. Nearly twenty years later, she was rediscovered in Devon, mainly due to the enthusiasm shown for her work by Francis Wyndham. During her years in seclusion, she had compiled the stories included in the collection "Tigers Are Better-Looking." In 1966, she made a remarkable return to literature with "Wide Sargasso Sea," for which she received the Royal Society of Literature Award and the W.H. Smith Award—her only comment at the award ceremony was, "It came too late." Her last collection of short stories, "Sleep it off Lady," was published in 1976, and "Smile Please," her unfinished autobiography, was published posthumously in 1979. Jean Rhys passed away in 1979.