[citation needed] ("Creole" was broadly used in those times to refer to any person born on the island, whether they were of European or African descent, or both.)
[citation needed] Rhys was educated in Dominica until the age of 16, when she was sent to England to live with an aunt, as her relations with her mother were difficult.
Unable to train as an actress and refusing to return to the Caribbean as her parents wished, Rhys worked with varied success as a chorus girl, adopting the names Vivienne, Emma, or Ella Gray.
[citation needed] In 1919, Rhys married Willem Johan Marie (Jean) Lenglet, a French-Dutch journalist, spy, and songwriter.
Rhys remained admirably loyal to him throughout, while their lives descended into conditions of extreme poverty, including even the hold of a boat and a horsebox.
"Coming from the West Indies, [Ford] declared, 'with a terrifying insight and... passion for stating the case of the underdog, she has let her pen loose on the Left Banks of the Old World'.
In After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1931), the protagonist, Julia Martin, is a more unravelled version of Marya Zelli, romantically dumped and inhabiting the pavements, cafes and cheap hotel rooms of Paris.
Here, she uses modified stream of consciousness to voice the experiences of an ageing woman, Sasha Jansen, who drinks, takes sleeping pills, and obsesses over her looks, and is adrift again in Paris.
Good Morning, Midnight, acknowledged as well written but deemed depressing, came as World War II broke out and readers sought optimism.
After a long absence from the public eye, she was rediscovered in Beckenham, South London, by Selma Vaz Dias, who in 1949 placed an advertisement in the New Statesman asking about her whereabouts, with a view to obtaining the rights to adapt her novel Good Morning, Midnight for radio.
She returned to themes of dominance and dependence, especially in marriage, depicting the mutually painful relationship between a privileged English man and a Creole woman from Jamaica made powerless on being duped and coerced by him and others.
[15][16] In 1976, Deutsch published another collection of her short stories, Sleep It Off Lady, consisting of 16 pieces from an approximately 75-year period, starting from the end of the 19th century.
From 1960, and for the rest of her life, Rhys lived in Cheriton Fitzpaine in Devon, once described by her as "a dull spot which even drink can't enliven much.
In an appreciation in the New York Times Book Review in 1974, A. Alvarez called Jean Rhys “quite simply, the best living English novelist".
Australian filmmaker John Duigan directed a 1993 erotic drama, Wide Sargasso Sea,[22] based on Rhys's best-known novel.
[24] In 2020, a pen allegedly owned by Rhys - a devotee of the ballpoint - was added to the Royal Society of Literature's historic collection for the signing of their Roll Book.
[26] The British Library acquired a selection of Jean Rhys Papers in 1972, including drafts of short stories, novels; After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, Voyage in the Dark, and Wide Sargasso Sea, and an unpublished play entitled English Harbour.
[28] The British Library also holds correspondence between Jean Rhys and Patrick Garland relating to his adaptation of "I Spy a Stranger" and about Quartet.