I lived here once
Jean Rhys’ ghostly life
Miranda Seymour
Illustrated. 421 pages. WW Norton and Company. $ 32.50.
Like George Orwell, Thomas Hardy, and WH Auden, British novelist Jean Rhys didn’t want to be the subject of a biography and took steps to muddy her way. The squirrel destroyed many of her letters. She tore a section from the journal. Throughout her life, she maintained “crazy discretion,” in the words of the latest biographer, Miranda Seymour.
These evasions have failed. Seymour’s book is Reese’s third major biography, following Carol Anzia’s 1985 long and excellent book and Lillian Pissicini’s shorter, more atmospheric 2009 book. Jean squirrel. “
Then again, perhaps Rhys (1890-1979) was very successful. “No clear account”, “I’m not sure”, “Mysterious silence”, “May”, “Completely missing document”, “Displayed”, “Probably”, etc. If you remove the phrase “I have a lot of questions,” Seymour’s biography shrinks by 10 percent.
In particular, what we know about Rhys’ life and career is considerable, if not encyclopedia, so these places clutter Seymour’s books. Of course, she is best known as the author of Charlotte Bronte’s “Jane Eyre” postcolonial prequel, “The Sea of Wide Sargaco” (1966). From the perspective of Rochester’s Creole wife, Antoinette Kosway, the novel depicts the squirrel’s own childhood on the Caribbean island of Dominica.
The novel was published when Lis was 76 years old, after the literary world almost forgot about her. Readers competed to catch up with her. Many people-I’m in it-are more attracted to her early novels, especially “Good Morning, Midnight” (1939) and her short stories. To some extent, a woman who is a fictitious alter ego, loneliness.
Rhys (pronounced Reese) lived a complex life that went against a neat summary. She left Dominica, where her father was a doctor, and studied at a boarding school in Cambridge. Mocked there for her nimble Caribbean accent, she spoke for the rest of her life in what Solmare calls a “cultivated whisper.”
She wanted to be an actress a few years before World War I, but often played a secondary role as a choir girl. She had a bad taste for men. Two of her three husbands were fascinating boundaries put in jail for fraud.
One of her early manuscripts fell into the hands of the more popular novelist Ford Madox Ford. To her, he was like the subject of a painting popping out of her picture frame.
Ford advised her to change her name — she was born as Elag Wendlin Rhys Williams — and helped publish her. She became his mistress. Her book found only a small audience and there was always a money problem. Squirrels spent decades, often isolated and delusional, in mass homes and apartments inside and outside London, before her success arrived late.
It’s at least one way to explain her life. It is also possible to capture only the more tragic and weird details that she was like a beach that was regularly hit by hurricanes, and the fact that the squirrel was a unique and difficult person.
Her first child, the son, died at the hospital at the age of three weeks at the very moment the squirrel and her husband were drinking champagne. She never forgave herself. She did not have a strong maternal instinct. Her second child, the daughter, grew up primarily in a series of baby shelters and orphanages.
The squirrel drank hard to ease her burden, and was known for Tyrade and other sneaky behavior. “I’m not the whining person like some women,” she told her friend. “I will attack.” Often this meant chewing, scratching, screaming, or spitting.
She has thin skin. Her shell was as transparent as a shrimp. She and her second husband fought a bruise battle. They landed in prison after one of them. Some thought she had killed him after he died of a heart attack at the age of 60. She was arrested at least once in public drunkenness and made a local newspaper.
When a dog in the neighborhood killed two cats, she threw a brick through the owner’s old stained glass window. She sometimes cast anti-Semitic insults. She was occasionally ordered to receive psychiatric care. In his book Difficult Women, writer David Plante crueles her nasty scenes later in her life when she gets caught in a toilet well that she had left open with a thin squirrel. I explained to.
Seymour is the author of many reputed biographies, including the biographies of Mary Shelley, Robert Graves, and Sir Byron’s wife and daughter. This somehow left her. Curiously, it’s not glossy.
On the one hand, it’s refreshing — a kind of biography explaining that the author prints his snapshot outside the school where Rhys attended and chats with various locals about her work.
On the other hand, it’s a mean spirit. Seymour, shortly before her death, gave a very fascinating photo of the great Diana Athill, the editor of the squirrel, “Smiles and bright clothes, she decides I’m worth her time. It’s included above the caption that says “I showed you when you did.”
Prose and analysis are soft. Seymour omits many of the best things Squirrel wrote and said, so she looks less smart than before. She, for example, squirrels’ keen interest in her appearance, unaware that the squirrel wrote that such an interest was “the real curse of Eve,” even quite late in her life. I will stay in Japan for a long time.
All chapters start with a quote, which is almost standard. However, Seymour does not tell me that Rhys wrote in the published journal: Paul Morand states in one of his books that English novelists always start with citations. Text before the sermon. I found that witty one. “
Solmare has some material that was not found in previous biographers. But the details of her book, sentence by sentence and page by page, are less spicy than Angie’s and what people ate and wore. Angie also did a better job of setting fiction with her life, without blurring the two.
The squirrel had a unique lonely intelligence and a talent for confronting difficult truths. If the only person who knows her is “Wide Salgassosy,” this book encourages you to diverge. It’s almost — almost, maybe — worth the admission fee.
