Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Jean Rhys
-
Standard Name: Rhys, Jean
Birth Name: Ella Gwendoline Rees Williams
Pseudonym: Jean Rhys
Pseudonym: Ella Gray
Jean Rhys wrote a number of novels and short stories focusing on her own geographical and emotional alienation, as well as an unfinished autobiography. Her fiction from between the two world ward was largely forgotten when her final novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, brought her major success. After this her novels and short-story collections were translated into many languages, including French, Dutch, Belgian, Swedish, German, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Hungarian, Italian, Yugoslavian, Japanese, Czech, Spanish, and Turkish. Her autobiography was translated into French. Several of her novels and stories have been adapted for radio, film and television.
During her marriage she and Edgar entertained the literary and avant-garde world: she later regaled her grand-daughter with irreverent stories of Joseph Conrad
, Jean Rhys
(Such a louche young woman),
Their daughter, Helen Pearl Humphry
(later known as H. Pearl Adam), was born in the same area of London in 1882 (her birth being registered in the second quarter), and, like her mother, she pursued...
Family and Intimate relationships
Ford Madox Ford
FMF
began an affair with novelist Jean Rhys
, who moved in with Ford and his common-law wife, Stella Bowen
, for a time.
Angier, Carole. Jean Rhys: Life and Work. Little, Brown, 1990.
131, 133, 156-7
Friends, Associates
Diana Athill
DA
's various memoirs mention too many friends to list them all here. She became a good friend of some of her authors: Jean Rhys
, for instance, and V. S. Naipaul
(with whom there...
Friends, Associates
Anna Kavan
After her relationship with Stuart Edmonds ended, AK
developed a large and close circle of friends who doted on her. Her friends were almost exclusively homosexual men, and she developed a reputation for not getting...
Intertextuality and Influence
Marina Warner
Warner also researched the history of British trade development in the Caribbean, which led her to emphasise how the hunger for sugar has pervaded our world over centuries. Histories and personal accounts of soldiers, botanists...
Intertextuality and Influence
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
The screenplay (as well as the Parisian location for the shooting) emphasizes the topographical background to a degree that Rhys
herself had not; the rendering of Rhys's original is arguably diluted in the finished...
Intertextuality and Influence
Charlotte Brontë
Jane Eyre has also been subject to a host of feminist revisions. Beatrice Kean Seymour
's The Hopeful Journey (1923) presents a response to, and The Second Mrs. Conford (1951) a reworking of, the novel's...
Intertextuality and Influence
Zoë Fairbairns
Most of the novel is spent uncovering truths about these two major characters: Heather, who seeks knowledge about her birth father (and enters briefly into rivalry with her mother, Julia, over the same man), and...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elma Napier
Critic Elaine Campbell
commends EN
's handling of social inequalities: issues of sexual and racial social imbalance are presented with a poise and control that preserve the novel from deteriorating into a polemical tract.
Campbell, Elaine. “An Expatriate at Home: Dominica’s Elma Napier”. Kunapipi, No. 1, Dangaroo Press, pp. 82 -93.
91
Intertextuality and Influence
U. A. Fanthorpe
With this volume, says UAF
, I entered the different world of S. Martin's, Lancaster, and of France; and I was just beginning to have things to say about the condition of women...
Home in this collection opens, Where is that I wonder? It then evokes comfortable, elegant settings of both childhood and adult life, and also a place where the poet awakes from dreaming of her dead...
Critic Bob Wake
discusses Highsmith's complex point-of-view techniques—a literary style begun by Henry James
—and her modelling The Talented Mr Ripley on his novel The Ambassadors (1903). He notes her humorous plays on the James...
Timeline
1 January 1916
The British edition of Vogue (an American fashion magazine) began publishing from Condé Nast
in Hanover Square, London.
