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.
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...
Textual Production
Susan Hill
The anthology of British women writers she published in 1990 with Michael Joseph
as The Parchment Moon: An Anthology of Modern Women's Short Stories was reprinted the following year as The Penguin Book of Modern...
Textual Production
Susan Hill
SH
was herself a contributor to People. In The Lighting of the Lamps, 1986, she collects her own critical essays (about reading, and about authors like Dickens
, John Wain
, and Jean Rhys
Literary responses
Patricia Highsmith
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...
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
Author summary
Ford Madox Ford
FMF
(who began publishing as Ford Madox Hueffer) was a significant figure in British and international modernism, and a prolific writer during the 1890s and the earlier part of the twentieth century. He produced fiction...
Stang, Sondra J., editor. “Introduction and Editorial Materials”. The Ford Madox Ford Reader, Carcanet, p. various pages.
200
Travel
Ford Madox Ford
After he had been living for four years in France (scene of his relationships with Stella Bowen
and Jean Rhys
and of his editorship of the transatlantic review) FMF
travelled to the United States...
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
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
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...
Textual Production
Shelagh Delaney
SD
adapted a novel by Jennifer Johnston
for the movie The Railway Station Man. She was also screenwriter for the film version of Jean Rhys
's Wide Sargasso Sea directed by John Duigan
.
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...
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...
