1. Jean Rhys, was a novelist who was born and grew up in the Caribbean island of Dominica.
30 Facts About Jean Rhys
1. 2.
Jean Rhys is best known for her novel Wide Sargasso Sea, written as a prequel to Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre.
3.
Jean Rhys was educated in Dominica until the age of 16, when she was sent to England to live with an aunt, as her relations with her mother were difficult.
4.
Jean Rhys attended the Perse School for Girls in Cambridge, where she was mocked as an outsider and for her accent.
5.
Jean Rhys attended two terms at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London by 1909.
6.
Jean Rhys's instructors despaired of her ever learning to speak "proper English" and advised her father to take her away.
7.
Unable to train as an actress and refusing to return to the Caribbean as her parents wished, Jean Rhys worked with varied success as a chorus girl, adopting the names Vivienne, Emma, or Ella Gray.
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Eliot Bliss 8.
Jean Rhys toured Britain's small towns and returned to rooming or boarding houses in rundown neighbourhoods of London.
9.
Distraught by events, including a near-fatal abortion, Jean Rhys began writing sketches and short stories.
10.
In 1919, Rhys married Willem Johan Marie Lenglet, a French-Dutch journalist, spy, and songwriter.
11.
In 1924, the year that the newly named Jean Rhys was discovered and published by the English writer Ford Madox Ford, Lenglet was imprisoned for embezzlement.
12.
The next year, Jean Rhys married Leslie Tilden-Smith, an English agent and editor.
13.
In 1936, they went briefly to Dominica, the first time Jean Rhys had returned since she had left for school.
14.
In 1937, Jean Rhys began a friendship with novelist Eliot Bliss.
15.
Jean Rhys became close to Phyllis Shand Allfree, whose family lived in Dominica.
16.
In 1947, Jean Rhys married Max Hamer, a solicitor who was a cousin of Tilden-Smith.
17.
Jean Rhys was convicted of fraud and imprisoned after their marriage.
18.
Jean Rhys remained admirably loyal to him throughout, while their lives descended into conditions of extreme poverty, including even the hold of a boat and a horsebox.
19.
In 1924, Jean Rhys came under the influence of Ford Madox Ford.
20.
At the time her husband was in jail for what Jean Rhys described as currency irregularities.
21.
Jean Rhys moved in with Ford and his long-time partner Stella Bowen.
22.
Jean Rhys's protagonist is a stranded foreigner, Marya Zelli, who finds herself at the mercy of strangers when her husband is jailed in Paris.
23.
Jean Rhys responded, and thereafter developed a long-lasting and collaborative friendship with Vaz Dias, who encouraged her to start writing again.
24.
Jean Rhys intended it as an account of the woman whom Rochester married and kept in his attic in Jane Eyre.
25.
Jean Rhys returned to themes of dominance and dependence, especially in marriage, depicting the mutually painful relationship between a privileged English man and a Creole woman from Jamaica made powerless on being duped and coerced by him and others.
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Eliot Bliss 26.
Jean Rhys portrays this woman from a quite different perspective from the one in Jane Eyre.
27.
Jean Rhys died in Exeter on 14 May 1979, at the age of 88, before completing an autobiography, which she had begun dictating only months earlier.
28.
Jean Rhys was appointed a CBE in the 1978 New Year Honours.
29.
Jean Rhys's collected papers and ephemera are housed in the University of Tulsa's McFarlin Library.
30.
Research material relating to Jean Rhys can be found in the Archive of Margaret Ramsey Ltd at the British Library relating to stage and film rights for adaptations to her work.