Jean+Rhys

Set in mid-1800s Jamaica, //Wide Sargasso Sea// is the least overtly autobiographical of Rhys's fiction. However, critics have noticed some connections between Rhys's life and family history and that of her doomed protagonist, Antoinette Cosway. Born Ella Gwendolyn Rees Williams in 1890, Rhys was the third child of a Creole mother and a Welsh doctor. She grew up in Dominica, one of the Windward Islands, and, like her heroine, moved from the Caribbean to England while still a teenager. Rhys's ancestors on her mother's side had been slaveholders in Dominica, and their plantation house was burned down by freed slaves soon after emancipation. Antoinette witnesses a similar scene in //Wide Sargasso Sea//. Like Antoinette, Rhys was educated at a convent school. Rhys left the Caribbean when her parents discovered her relationship with a part-black man. In //Wide Sargasso Sea//, Antoinette's husband shuttles her off to England after hearing rumors of her illicit affair with her "mulatto" cousin Sandi. Tragically, Antoinette's insanity was also mirrored in Rhys's bouts with depression and occasional confinements in mental institutions.

Moving to England in 1907, Rhys tried her hand at acting. Finding work as a chorus girl, Rhys eventually became the kept mistress of an older man. This relationship, and many subsequent ones, ended unhappily. In 1917, Rhys married Willem Lenglet, a Dutch writer. After the couple moved to Paris in 1924, Rhys began publishing her short stories under the patronage of the English novelist Ford Madox Ford. Her first novel, //Quartet//, published in 1928, was a thinly veiled fictional account of her love affair with Ford. Rhys eventually returned to England, where she continued to write stories and novels featuring female protagonists on the margins of society. In 1939, Rhys disappeared from the public eye for a number of years. She had married Leslie Tilden-Smith, her literary agent, in 1937. Two years after his death in 1945, she married his cousin Max Hamer. In 1948, Rhys was briefly institutionalized at the Holloway Prison Hospital. Her alcoholic assault on her neighbors led the authorities to question her sanity. Around this time, the British radio actress Selma Vas Dias began to search for Rhys, hoping to do a radio broadcast of Rhys's 1939 novel //Good Morning Midnight//. Vas Dias and many others had assumed Rhys was dead.

With new public interest in her writing, Rhys secured a contract for the novel that would become //Wide Sargasso Sea//. Still drinking to excess, caring for her ailing third husband, and hampered by poor health, Rhys did not complete the novel until 1966. In a letter, Rhys explained that she had brooded over //Jane Eyre// for years and that she was vexed at [Bronte's] portrait of the 'paper tiger' lunatic, the all wrong creole scenes, and above all by the real cruelty of Mr. Rochester. Her re-reading of Charlotte Bronte's //Jane Eyre// inspired her to write the ‘‘true story’’ of Bertha Mason, whom Rhys renamed Antoinette Cosway. //Wide Sargasso Sea// was an instant success, winning the W. H. Smith Award for writers and the Heinemann Award of the Royal Society of Literature. Rhys followed this novel with two more collections of short stories. She was working on her autobiography, //Smile Please//, when she died at the age of 88 in 1979.

//Source:// Literature of Developing Nations for Students//, ©2012 Gale Cengage. All Rights Reserved//