| Jean Rhys |
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(Issue 6 - January 2010) Pride: A celebration of West Indians who have influenced the world
4th August 1890 – 14th May 1979 The West Indies have produced some outstanding writers – brilliant poets such as Grace Nichols and EK Brathwaite. Nobel Prize-winner Derek Walcott and the novelist VS Naipaul and are world-renowned. There are many others, including the remarkable Jean Rhys. Jean Rhys was born in Roseau, Dominica, in 1890. Her father was a Welsh doctor, her mother a third-generation Creole of Scottish descent. Their (spectacularly unhappy) marriage reflected many of the harsher aspects of nineteenth-century life, not least the arbitrary power men had over women, an institution Rhys saw as comparable to the master-slave relationship that blighted the West Indian past. Tragically, her own life followed a similar destructive pattern. Fortunately for us, however, her means of dealing with her pain, discovered in early childhood, was writing – not escapist fantasy but unvarnished reality, as she saw it. She was a brilliant observer, both of the subtler attitudes of people, whether black, white or ‘coloured’, and of the physical splendour of the islands. Never sentimental or gushing, her pages convey an almost palpable sense of place. Her ear for speech, especially the language of the uneducated, is acute. Sharp, shrewd and often deeply wise, their pithy observations add depth and resonance to the writing. At 17 she was sent to school in England, which she hated. She decamped to a drama college in London, joined a theatre chorus, and, after the war, systematically went to the dogs. Living as a footloose bohemian in Paris and elsewhere, she embarked on a series of liaisons and marriages with powerful men, all predictably ending in disaster. Writing remained her consolation. Though mainly focused on her unhappy present she was also haunted by the past, and West Indian attitudes and settings constantly recur. She published several books, became briefly famous, then fell out of fashion and disappeared. In the 1960s she was found living reclusively in southern England, at work on a new novel. It was to be her masterpiece, Wide Sargasso Sea. Set in Jamaica in the difficult years following the abolition of slavery, it draws on the pattern of her mother’s married life, and indeed her own, to show the workings of an entire social order. Its starting point is an even more famous work, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Everyone remembers that at the end of Jane Eyre Mr Rochester’s mad first wife (hidden in the attic) maliciously sets fire to the great house, killing herself and leaving the master partially blind but free to marry the eponymous heroine. Less well remembered is that the wife is a Creole, from the West Indies. Jean Rhys fills in the background to that marriage (with surprising sympathy for both sides), showing us the inner reality of the woman’s life and the appalling social arrangements that produced her. She does this in starkly beautiful prose, conjuring up a world not entirely departed, whose physical landscapes remained, for her, the loveliest on earth. For anyone wishing to understand the complex past of the islands, this brief, brilliant novel is essential reading. |
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