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Jean Rhys, described by Al Alvarez as 'one of the finest British writers of this century', was an artist of brilliance and fury best known for her late literary masterpiece, Wide Sargasso Sea. But she was also a woman in constant psychological turmoil, never far from the edge, whose blazing talent rescued her time and time again from the abyss. In The Blue Hour, Lilian Pizzichini enters Rhys's twilit demimonde, starting with her dreamy girlhood in the lush island heat of Dominica and following her vagabond existence from chorus girl to artist's model in cold, inhospitable London, to abandoned wife and hapless mother in bohemian 1920s Paris, through three failed marriages and five misunderstood books to screaming drunk in suburban Beckenham, and finally to feted elderly author who considered her critical acclaim to have 'come too late'. Rhys was made a CBE in 1978, the year before she died. This compelling and heartbreaking biography - the first truly intimate account of Rhys since her unfinished autobiography Smile Pleasein 1979 - is an unforgettable portrait of a woman whose writing was both her life and her lifeline, and a unique attempt to see the world as Rhys herself saw it- hostile, chaotic, full of flawed humanity and fragile dreams, life experienced through the thinnest of skins.… (más)
I read this biography in conjunction with a reread of Wide Sargasso Sea and a complete reading of Rhys's other four novellas and her short stories. As such, it was a useful biography to put the works into the context of Rhys's life, but it was also frustrating due to its lack of footnoting, which makes it difficult at times to distinguish between Rhys's largely autobiographical fiction and the actual facts of Rhys's own life. This lack of footnoting gives this biography a feeling of "popular" biography, and I'm not sure Rhys is of sufficient interest to draw a large "popular" readership to her life — but, in contrast, I think academic readers are going to find the lack of footnoting disconcerting.
Useful, but Lilian Pizzichini is, shall we say, no Juliet Barker, Jenny Uglow, or Hermione Lee.
And now, having finished Rhys's own Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography, I'll add that Pizzichini is too reliant on Rhys's own published writings in Pizzichini's own authorship of this biography. ( )
Jean Rhys, alchemist and alcoholic, lived a long and angry life. In her writing, she found sanctuary, and maybe redemption, by transmuting the lead and arsenic of her daily relations into literary gold. Lilian Pizzichini's The Blue Hour is a dispassionate look at the career and careening of a woman of whom it must have been difficult to be an indifferent acquaintance. A few, always, felt a need to hold her hand, and kept her afloat; most people, I think, would have preferred to slap her. If you've read Rhys novels, you will recognize much of the biographical material in The Blue Hour. Pizzichini covers Rhys's childhood in the Caribbean, her teen years in London, her life as a showgirl, as a gamine in Paris, and as a wife in Vienna. Rhys unabashedly cannibalized her life for her art. Her writing is spare, precise, and cuts like a knife. And so, by reflection, The Blue Hour slashes, involuntarily, at its own portrait of Rhys. An alcoholic heroine is, ultimately, a contradiction in terms, and judging Rhys is a close call. Did she cleverly harvest the fruits of her alcoholism to enable her embittered isolation, or did she heroically transcend her isolation in writing about it? Jean Rhys - whether lady, tiger, or feral kitten - kneaded people with very sharp claws. ( )
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
'Like' is of all the words the most ridiculous with which to express the love that I have for this place, love that has something almost physical about it so that in moments of pain I have quite literally lain full length and drawn solace from the ground. Elizabeth Garner, Duet in Discord
There is nothing unusual in all this, except to those who live like exiles in grey shadows.
Phyllis Allfrey, The Orchid House
Dedicatoria
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
For Dolly and Rita
Primeras palabras
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
Foreward
In the summer of 1912 the French parfumier Jaques Guerlain concocted a scent from musk and rose de Bulgarie with a single note of jasmine. He intended his new scent, which he called L'Heure Bleue, to evoke dusk in the city. The blue hour is the time when heliotropes and irises in Parisian window boxes are bathed in a blue light and the well-groomed Parisienne prepares for the evening.
On 25 February 1936, Jean Rhys boarded a French ship called the Cuba As Southampton dock.
Citas
Últimas palabras
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
On 14 May 1979 Jean Rhys, nee Ella Gwendoline Rees Williams, died, three months before her eighty-ninth birthday.
Jean Rhys, described by Al Alvarez as 'one of the finest British writers of this century', was an artist of brilliance and fury best known for her late literary masterpiece, Wide Sargasso Sea. But she was also a woman in constant psychological turmoil, never far from the edge, whose blazing talent rescued her time and time again from the abyss. In The Blue Hour, Lilian Pizzichini enters Rhys's twilit demimonde, starting with her dreamy girlhood in the lush island heat of Dominica and following her vagabond existence from chorus girl to artist's model in cold, inhospitable London, to abandoned wife and hapless mother in bohemian 1920s Paris, through three failed marriages and five misunderstood books to screaming drunk in suburban Beckenham, and finally to feted elderly author who considered her critical acclaim to have 'come too late'. Rhys was made a CBE in 1978, the year before she died. This compelling and heartbreaking biography - the first truly intimate account of Rhys since her unfinished autobiography Smile Pleasein 1979 - is an unforgettable portrait of a woman whose writing was both her life and her lifeline, and a unique attempt to see the world as Rhys herself saw it- hostile, chaotic, full of flawed humanity and fragile dreams, life experienced through the thinnest of skins.
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Useful, but Lilian Pizzichini is, shall we say, no Juliet Barker, Jenny Uglow, or Hermione Lee.
And now, having finished Rhys's own Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography, I'll add that Pizzichini is too reliant on Rhys's own published writings in Pizzichini's own authorship of this biography. (