For years, I kept hearing about this Jean Rhys and this novel Wide Sargasso Sea. I found a copy of the novel and finally read it, riveted. I loved her reimagining of the ‘mad wife’ in Jane Eyre, Bronte’s story turned into a social commentary about colonialism and the rejection of female sexuality.

That was twenty years or so ago. I knew nothing more about Rhys when I picked up this new biography, I Used To Live Here Once by Miranda Seymour. Her portrait of Rhys is unforgettable and complex, the story of a woman born too soon, who lived passionately and in seclusion, married unwisely for love, plummeted from wealth to poverty, and rose to fame to forgotten to lionized.

Seymour writes that “Rhys often said that she wrote about herself because that was all she knew,” and throughout the biography she demonstrates how Rhys’ characters were born of her experience, but also that they are born of Rhys’ imagination, and are not autobiographical clones. Rhys took what she knew, her Dominican childhood, her young adulthood as a chorus girl on tour, her bohemian life in Paris, her love affairs and marriages, and turned it into dark stories that publishers found too raw, unfit for a woman writer’s pen.

We met a woman who is damaged but determined, who bends to her weaknesses and shows incredible strength. Her beauty and charm lured men to want to possess her, then her violent temper dealt out blows. She walked away from an education to pursue the stage and yet wrote what the BBC identified as one of the ‘top 100 most influential novels.’

Her life was almost incomprehensibly complicated! If anyone truly lived, it was Rhys. Over her long life she went mad and discarded friends and men, hobnobbed with so many important people! Like so many Lost Generation writers she struggled with alcoholism, drug dependency and depression. She suffered accidents, underwent abortions, and was hospitalized for mental breakdown. No wonder she created unforgettable characters, women who contended with so much.

She was seventy-five years old when she published Wide Sargasso Sea in 1966. Rhys was ‘rediscovered’ by a new generation, finally found financial security, and unwelcomed fame. To the end of her life, she took care of her appearance, this petit blue-eyed, once blond-haired octogenarian, with her pink and white wigs and fashionable colorful clothes.

You won’t always like Jean Rhys. But you will be impressed by her resilience and determination.

Now, to read the rest of her work…

I received a free egalley from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased. ( )