Jean Rhys

Biography

Jean Rhys (born Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams, 1890–1979) was born in Dominica to a Welsh doctor father and a Dominican Creole mother. She moved to England at sixteen and spent decades trying to assimilate into a world that never quite accepted her. Her early novels in the 1920s–30s drew on Parisian and London bohemian life; then she disappeared from public view for nearly thirty years, reportedly dead. She had been writing Wide Sargasso Sea for most of that time. Published in 1966 when she was seventy-six, the novel won the W.H. Smith Prize and rescued her from oblivion. She had always felt, she said, like a woman without a country — too white for Dominica, too Creole for England. Antoinette's position is her own.

Jean Rhys at a glance