The Many Confrontations of Jean Rhys
In her life and in her writing, the author of post-colonial works such as “Wide Sargasso Sea” met adversity—inflicted and self-inflicted—with an unflinching eye.
By James Wood
It’s natural to consider Virginia Woolf and Jean Rhys literary allies of a sort, near-contemporaries doing pioneering work at the same time, both adept at constructing productive lives in the shadow of trauma. But, though Woolf was always a prominent figure, Rhys disappeared so thoroughly from literary existence that in 1949, when an actress, Selma Vaz Dias, tried to contact her about the possibility of developing a dramatic adaptation of “Good Morning, Midnight,” she had to resort to a personal ad appealing for information about the novelist’s whereabouts. “Very tactless of me to be alive,” Rhys later commented...
In truth, Woolf and Rhys might as well have come from different planets.
www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/07/11/the-many-confrontations-of-jean-rhys-miranda-seymour-i-used-to-live-here-once