Jean Rhys

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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.
Jean Rhys (left, in hat) with Mollie Stoner

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
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.
131, 133, 156-7
Family and Intimate relationships Fay Weldon
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),
Weldon, Fay. Auto da Fay. Flamingo.
102
Ford Madox Ford
Family and Intimate relationships Charlotte Eliza Humphry
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...
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...
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...
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 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, Vol.
4
, No. 1, Dangaroo Press, pp. 82-93.
91
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
Recuperative efforts by critics of Caribbean women's literature, such as Elaine Campbell , Evelyn O'Callaghan , Alison Donnell , and Sarah Lawson Welsh , have recovered EN 's work and placed it within the literary...
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...
Intertextuality and Influence Elaine Feinstein
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...
Intertextuality and Influence Edna O'Brien
EOB has named many women writers as important to her: she includes among these Jane Austen , Emily Dickinson , Elizabeth Bowen , Anna Akhmatova , Anita Brookner , and Margaret Atwood , adding: Every...
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...
Literary responses Diana Athill
A chorus of praise greeted this book. The chapter on Jean Rhys was hailed as a miniature masterpiece.Jules Verdone in the Boston Globe suggested that that DA had the knack of presenting as history...

Timeline

1 January 1916: The British edition of Vogue (an American...

Building item

1 January 1916

The British edition of Vogue (an American fashion magazine) began publishing from Condé Nast in Hanover Square, London.

Texts

Rhys, Jean. After Leaving Mr Mackenzie. Jonathan Cape.
de Nève, Edward. Barred. Translator Rhys, Jean, Desmond Harmsworth.
Rhys, Jean. Good Morning, Midnight. Constable.
Wyndham, Francis, and Jean Rhys. “Introduction”. Jean Rhys Letters, 1931-1966, Deutsch, 1984, pp. 9-12.
Athill, Diana, and Jean Rhys. “Jean Rhys and her Autobiography”. Smile Please, Deutsch, 1979, pp. 5-15.
Rhys, Jean. Jean Rhys Letters, 1931-1966. Editors Wyndham, Francis and Diana Melly, Deutsch, 1984.
Rhys, Jean. My Day: Three Pieces by Jean Rhys. Frank Hallman.
Carco, Francis. Perversity. Translator Rhys, Jean, Pascal Covici.
Wyndham, Francis et al. “Preface”. Wide Sargasso Sea, edited by Judith Raiskin, W. W. Norton, 1999, p. ix - xiii.
Rhys, Jean. Quartet. Chatto and Windus.
Rhys, Jean. Sleep It Off Lady: Stories by Jean Rhys. Deutsch.
Rhys, Jean, and Diana Athill. Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography. Deutsch, 1979.
Rhys, Jean, and Ford Madox Ford. The Left Bank, and Other Stories. Jonathan Cape.
Rhys, Jean, and Ford Madox Ford. Tigers Are Better-Looking. Deutsch.
Rhys, Jean. “Vienne”. transatlantic review, edited by Ford Madox Ford and Ford Madox Ford, Vol.
12
.
Rhys, Jean. Voyage in the Dark. Constable.
Rhys, Jean, and Francis Wyndham. Wide Sargasso Sea. Deutsch.