![]() ![]() Rhys often said that she regretted having written Quartet out of spite, fuelled by the sense that her lover and mentor, Ford Madox Ford, had betrayed both her and her first, adored husband, Jean Lenglet. ![]() William Trevor thought Rhys’s I Used to Live Here Once was the finest short ghost story yet written. Based on – as ever with Rhys – her own raw sense of being an outsider, these disquieting stories of civilian life show an exceptionally truthful writer at her most courageous, working in the genre she most enjoyed. A Solid House, I Spy a Stranger, The Sound of the River and Temps Perdu were all rejected by publishers in 1947 as too depressing for war-weary readers to stomach. Several of Rhys’s short stories deserve more attention. Moments of mad comedy punctuate Sasha’s dreadful, knowing journey towards one of the most powerful endings in the history of fiction. Set in Paris in 1937, it is whispered into our ears by Sasha Jansen, another outsider and a woman with a black sense of humour about her own misfortunes. Good Morning, Midnight is my favourite of Rhys’s five slender novels and her masterpiece. This novel is a great example of Rhys’s talent for capturing the way alienated and victimised women feel. Told by a vulnerable newcomer to London from the Caribbean, Rhys’s third novel draws on her own experience of love, heartbreak, hope and loneliness to create an unforgettable portrait of its protagonist Anna Morgan. I’d go straight from the memoir into Voyage in the Dark. ![]() I can’t imagine a better way to get to know her. It was the first thing by Rhys that I read and I fell in love with her voice on the spot. The biggest surprise when reading this luminous memoir of the author’s early life in the Caribbean, London and Paris, is that she started writing it in her 70s. ‘Not quite so serious.’” It is this opening line that gives the autobiography Smile Please its title, as a young Rhys fails to do as she’s told when posing for a photo. Her biographer Miranda Seymour suggests some good places to start. But that prequel to Jane Eyre was actually the Dominica-born author’s last book, and there are riches in store for those who haven’t yet explored the rest of her work. Most people know Jean Rhys as the author of Wide Sargasso Sea, a title often featured on school and university reading lists. She writes, “ Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys’s prequel to Jane Eyre, is a set text in schools but are you familiar with the rest of the Dominica-born writer’s work? This handy guide from her biographer will help you find a way in.” ![]() Miranda Seymour ( The Guardian) suggests to her readers where to start with Jean Rhys… Seymour is author of the forthcoming I Used to Live Here Once: The Haunted Life of Jean Rhys (W. ![]()
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