Jean Rhys

Jean Rhys, (born Ella Gwendoline Rees Williams; 24 August 1890 – 14 May 1979) was a British novelist who was born and grew up in the Caribbean island of Dominica.

From the age of 16, she mainly resided in England, where she was sent for her education.

She attended two terms at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London by 1909.

Her instructors despaired of her ever learning to speak "proper English" and advised her father to take her away.

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.

She toured Britain's small towns and returned to rooming or boarding houses in rundown neighbourhoods of London.

After her father died in 1910, Rhys appeared to have experimented with living as a demimondaine.

She became the mistress of wealthy stockbroker Lancelot Grey Hugh Smith, whose father Hugh Colin Smith had been Governor of the Bank of England.

Though a bachelor, Smith did not offer to marry Rhys, and their affair soon ended.

However, he continued to be an occasional source of financial help.

Distraught by events, including a near-fatal abortion (not Smith's child), Rhys began writing and produced an early version of her novel Voyage in the Dark.

In 1913, she was self-employed for a time in London.

During the First World War, Rhys served as a volunteer worker in a soldiers' canteen.

In 1918, she worked in a pension office.

In 1919, Rhys married Willem Johan Marie (Jean) Lenglet, a French-Dutch journalist, spy, and songwriter.

He was the first of her three husbands.

She and Lenglet wandered throughout Europe.

They had two children, a son who died young and a daughter.

In 1924, Rhys came under the influence of English writer Ford Madox Ford.

After meeting Ford in Paris, Rhys wrote short stories under his patronage.

They divorced in 1933, and their daughter lived mostly with her father.

The next year, Rhys married Leslie Tilden-Smith, an English editor.

In 1936, they went briefly to Dominica, the first time Rhys had returned since she had left for school.

She found her family estate deteriorating and island conditions less agreeable.

Her brother Oscar was living in England, and she took care of some financial affairs for him, making a settlement with a mixed-race woman on the island and Oscar's illegitimate children by her.

In 1937, Rhys began a friendship with novelist Eliot Bliss (whose first name she had taken in honour of one of her most admired writers).

The two women shared Caribbean backgrounds.

The correspondence between them survives.

In 1939, Rhys and Tilden-Smith moved to Devon, where they lived for several years.

He died in 1945.

In 1947, Rhys married Max Hamer, a solicitor who was a cousin of Tilden-Smith.

He was convicted of fraud and imprisoned after their marriage.

She is best known for her novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), written as a prequel to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre.

He died in 1966.

In 1978, she was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for her writing.

Rhys's father, William Rees Williams, was a Welsh medical doctor and her mother, Minna Williams, née Lockhart, a third-generation Dominican Creole of Scots ancestry.

("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.) She had a brother.

Her mother's family had an estate, a former plantation, on the island.

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.

She attended the Perse School for Girls in Cambridge, where she was mocked as an outsider and for her accent.