Description
Book SynopsisJean Rhys was born in Dominica in 1890, the daughter of a Welsh doctor and a white Creole mother, and came to England when she was sixteen. Her first book, a collection of stories called
The Left Bank, was published in 1927. This was followed by
Quartet (originally
Postures, 1928),
After Leaving Mr Mackenzie (1930),
Voyage in the Dark (1934) and
Good Morning, Midnight (1939). None of these books was particularly successful and with the outbreak of war they went out of print. Jean Rhys dropped from sight until nearly twenty years later she was discovered living reclusively in Cornwall. During those years she had accumulated the stories collected in
Tigers are Better-Looking. In 1966 she made a sensational reappearance with
Wide Sargasso Sea, which won the Royal Society of Literature Award and the W. H. Smith Award. Her final collection of stories,
Sleep It Off Lady, appeared in 1976 and
Smile Please, her unfinished au
Trade ReviewCompelling, painful and exquisite * Guardian *
Brilliant. A tale of dislocation and dispossession, which Rhys writes with a kind of romantic cynicism, desperate and pungent * The Times *
Rhys turns a menacing cipher into a grieving, plausible young woman, and one whose story says whole worlds about global mixtures, about the misunderstandings between the colonized, the colonizers and the people who can't easily say which they are * Time *
