Miranda Seymour: ‘Jean Rhys was far ahead of her time’

Rhys recreated Bertha’s (Antoinette Cosway in Wide Sargasso Sea) childhood and youth as a Creolean heiress, her first meeting with a young Rochester and marriage to him, and her eventual breakdown, all vividly rest alongside vignettes of postcolonial racial and sexual exploitation.

In her shoes

English biographer, novelist and critic Miranda Seymour in a new biography of Jean Rhys — I Used to Live Here Once: The Haunted Life of Jean Rhys — attempts to do what no other biographer has done before. She walks in Rhy’s footsteps and travels to her birthplace in Roseau, to chronicle her time in Dominica.

Carole Angier wrote one of Rhys’ earliest biographies (Jean Rhys: Life and Work, 1966). Lillian Pizzichini’s The Blue Hour: A Life of Jean Rhys came much later in 2009. But neither visited the island of Dominica in the French Caribbean where Rhys was born in 1890 and sent the first 16 years of her life.

“Dominica haunts Rhys’s work. It’s an extraordinary island; wild, lush, beautiful, fierce and poor, all at the same time. It is the setting for the unforgettable central section of Wide Sargasso Sea, a novel that was published in 1966 but had been on her mind since 1934. She had, in fact, wanted to call it Two Tunes – the first tune was the siren song of the past, calling Anna out of a doomed present and then back into a lost, more innocent world,” Seymour says.

The Geneva Estate was the plantation house of Rhys’s mother’s family. It was burnt down in 1930 following The Census riots. That incident inspired the burning of Antoinette’s home in Wide Sargasso Sea. When Rhys and her second husband visited the plantation in 1936, they decided to stay in an estate further up in the north of the island.

Seymour visited that house with Lennox Honychurch, Dominica’s most noted historian, who showed her how the place was almost an exact replica of the lost house of Geneva, and how Rhys must have drawn on it when she was evoking that beautiful, sad home in the opening section of Wide Sargasso Sea.

“I was lucky in that I was able to climb through a window into Rhys’s former townhouse. It was all boarded up, desolate, terribly sad, but I did manage to identify her bedroom and the platform where she used to lie out listening to the carnival singers, watching the stars. They pulled the house down last year and the new one is called Sargasso Towers. Dominicans live in the present, not the past and sadly, they don’t have a huge amount of interest in Jean Rhys,” Seymour explains.

Seymour’s interest as a biographer has always been in looking at women who have been underrated, misinterpreted or neglected. Her previous works include biographies of Mary Shelley, Ottonline Morrell, Hellé Nice, and Lord Byron’s wife and daughters, among others.

In the case of Jean Rhys, a writer she has long admired, two things needed to be addressed: one was the confusion between “the Rhys woman” of her novels, the second was the writer who created those women.

“An obvious and crucial difference between Jean Rhys and her fictions is that the women about whom Rhys writes are neither readers nor writers. Living alone, Julia (After Leaving Mr Mackenzie), Anna (Voyage in the Dark), Sasha (Good Morning, Midnight) and Marya (Quartet) have no inner resources, no sense of a vocation. Certainly, Rhys often lived in similar circumstances when she was in Paris (cheap, grim little bedrooms; Latin quarter bars; back streets), but not always. A generous French woman, Germaine Richelot, often subsidised Rhy’s visits to Paris and saw to it that she lived in a pleasant quartier close to her own elegant family home. It was in rooms of this kind, often in Saint Germain, that Rhys wrote at least two of her novels,” explains Seymour.

Drunk with words

Rhys herself was a voracious and up-to-date reader, whose library included well-thumbed books by Sartre, Celine, Koestler, Hemingway, Joyce and Beckett. Why then, do the women in her fiction prefer leafing through the pages of a fashion magazine?

“Rhys’s women depend on alcohol to get them through the days and nights. Rhys, although a drinker, swore off the drink while she was revising. She was a meticulous obsessive in her unrelenting search for perfection. You can spot the difference when you look at a fragment of her second novel, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, before the revisions. Her initial drafts are wild, almost illegible scrawls, filled with gaps. She probably wrote it with a bottle at her side and the hard work came later,” Seymour explains.

The unedited drafts, only a handful of them, can be found at the British Library. Very little of her in-progress work survives because of poverty and constant shifts of home, which made it difficult for historians to hang onto more than a few basics.

Seymour’s first tryst with Jean Rhys came when she read Smile Please, an unfinished memoir of Rhy’s early life which breaks off in 1924. This was the point where her life changed. Her first husband went to prison and Rhys joined a ménage à trois in Paris with Ford Madox Ford and his partner, Stella Bowen. Ford was also the publisher of Rhys’s first work, a marvellous short story called Vienne.

“Smile Please is broken up into short episodes, almost snapshots, of Rhys’s girlhood in Dominica. It doesn’t tell us everything; there’s no mention of ‘Mr Howard’, the man who seduced her when she was 14, but it does let the reader understand why Rhys felt so passionately attached to that strange and sorrowful island. My surprise came when I found that she dictated this exquisite little memoir in her eighties, at the very end of her life. The voice is so clear, so girlish, so direct, that I imagined I was reading one of the first things Jean Rhys ever wrote. Later, I read her novels and the marvellous, too neglected short stories. I was electrified by her voice. All of her work needs to be on audiobooks. The writing is so perfect, so careful, so alive. Later on in her life, she said that she always tried to put a space around each word. She wrote like a poet, in some ways,” recalls Seymour.

Jean Rhys was never well-off, even after the success of her last novel. But she did want to leave something for her daughter. Seymour went over her notebooks in which Rhys wrote down all the ideas for her work. She listened to a tape recording of Rhys herself, as an old lady, singing island songs from her childhood on Dominica in a sweet, quavering voice that occasionally breaks into laughter or tears.

“Sometimes, reading her notebooks, I’d come across a statement that would hold me still. She’d write: I have to earn my death. Or ‘To write as well as I can is my truth and why I was born.’ Rhys felt that. And she held herself to account. Everything bad or stupid that she did – and Rhys did sometimes behave pretty wildly – could be forgiven if she wrote well enough and if – above all – she told the truth as she saw it,” says Seymour.

For readers and students of literature, Wide Sargasso Sea remains Rhys’s magnum opus. It is her most commercially successful work till date. But Seymour doesn’t agree with the assessment.

“I think her greatest novel by far is Good Morning Midnight, written of the eve of war in a voice that’s both blackly funny and shockingly sad. What I would really love to see being read more often are her wartime stories,”

Reading Rhy’s notebooks allowed Seymour to look into her mind and personality, both often fraught with the violent history of her origins and evocative restlessness. Her voice was volatile and yet balanced between joy and despair. Nothing like anyone else’s. And perhaps, that’s why it’s difficult to compare her works with anyone in the contemporary literary landscape.

“Rhys seems to know you so intimately; it’s like having somebody whisper in your ear all the worst things you ever knew about yourself. And then, just as you feel ready to howl, she cracks you up and makes you laugh. The voices she most evokes for me are those of writers like Phoebe Waller Bridge, who created Fleabag. The way she breaks down the wall between the viewer and the screen by turning directly to you, speaking to you as if you were intimate friends – that’s what Rhys does too. But she was doing it years before anybody else had even thought of using a voice like that,” Seymour signs off.

Arunima Mazumdar is an independent writer. She is @sermoninstone on Twitter and @sermonsinstone on Instagram

The views expressed are personal

Rhys recreated Bertha’s (Antoinette Cosway in Wide Sargasso Sea) childhood and youth as a Creolean heiress, her first meeting with a young Rochester and marriage to him, and her eventual breakdown, all vividly rest alongside vignettes of postcolonial racial and sexual exploitation.

In her shoes

English biographer, novelist and critic Miranda Seymour in a new biography of Jean Rhys — I Used to Live Here Once: The Haunted Life of Jean Rhys — attempts to do what no other biographer has done before. She walks in Rhy’s footsteps and travels to her birthplace in Roseau, to chronicle her time in Dominica.

Carole Angier wrote one of Rhys’ earliest biographies (Jean Rhys: Life and Work, 1966). Lillian Pizzichini’s The Blue Hour: A Life of Jean Rhys came much later in 2009. But neither visited the island of Dominica in the French Caribbean where Rhys was born in 1890 and sent the first 16 years of her life.

“Dominica haunts Rhys’s work. It’s an extraordinary island; wild, lush, beautiful, fierce and poor, all at the same time. It is the setting for the unforgettable central section of Wide Sargasso Sea, a novel that was published in 1966 but had been on her mind since 1934. She had, in fact, wanted to call it Two Tunes – the first tune was the siren song of the past, calling Anna out of a doomed present and then back into a lost, more innocent world,” Seymour says.

The Geneva Estate was the plantation house of Rhys’s mother’s family. It was burnt down in 1930 following The Census riots. That incident inspired the burning of Antoinette’s home in Wide Sargasso Sea. When Rhys and her second husband visited the plantation in 1936, they decided to stay in an estate further up in the north of the island.

Seymour visited that house with Lennox Honychurch, Dominica’s most noted historian, who showed her how the place was almost an exact replica of the lost house of Geneva, and how Rhys must have drawn on it when she was evoking that beautiful, sad home in the opening section of Wide Sargasso Sea.

“I was lucky in that I was able to climb through a window into Rhys’s former townhouse. It was all boarded up, desolate, terribly sad, but I did manage to identify her bedroom and the platform where she used to lie out listening to the carnival singers, watching the stars. They pulled the house down last year and the new one is called Sargasso Towers. Dominicans live in the present, not the past and sadly, they don’t have a huge amount of interest in Jean Rhys,” Seymour explains.

Seymour’s interest as a biographer has always been in looking at women who have been underrated, misinterpreted or neglected. Her previous works include biographies of Mary Shelley, Ottonline Morrell, Hellé Nice, and Lord Byron’s wife and daughters, among others.

In the case of Jean Rhys, a writer she has long admired, two things needed to be addressed: one was the confusion between “the Rhys woman” of her novels, the second was the writer who created those women.

“An obvious and crucial difference between Jean Rhys and her fictions is that the women about whom Rhys writes are neither readers nor writers. Living alone, Julia (After Leaving Mr Mackenzie), Anna (Voyage in the Dark), Sasha (Good Morning, Midnight) and Marya (Quartet) have no inner resources, no sense of a vocation. Certainly, Rhys often lived in similar circumstances when she was in Paris (cheap, grim little bedrooms; Latin quarter bars; back streets), but not always. A generous French woman, Germaine Richelot, often subsidised Rhy’s visits to Paris and saw to it that she lived in a pleasant quartier close to her own elegant family home. It was in rooms of this kind, often in Saint Germain, that Rhys wrote at least two of her novels,” explains Seymour.

Drunk with words

Rhys herself was a voracious and up-to-date reader, whose library included well-thumbed books by Sartre, Celine, Koestler, Hemingway, Joyce and Beckett. Why then, do the women in her fiction prefer leafing through the pages of a fashion magazine?

“Rhys’s women depend on alcohol to get them through the days and nights. Rhys, although a drinker, swore off the drink while she was revising. She was a meticulous obsessive in her unrelenting search for perfection. You can spot the difference when you look at a fragment of her second novel, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, before the revisions. Her initial drafts are wild, almost illegible scrawls, filled with gaps. She probably wrote it with a bottle at her side and the hard work came later,” Seymour explains.

The unedited drafts, only a handful of them, can be found at the British Library. Very little of her in-progress work survives because of poverty and constant shifts of home, which made it difficult for historians to hang onto more than a few basics.

Seymour’s first tryst with Jean Rhys came when she read Smile Please, an unfinished memoir of Rhy’s early life which breaks off in 1924. This was the point where her life changed. Her first husband went to prison and Rhys joined a ménage à trois in Paris with Ford Madox Ford and his partner, Stella Bowen. Ford was also the publisher of Rhys’s first work, a marvellous short story called Vienne.

“Smile Please is broken up into short episodes, almost snapshots, of Rhys’s girlhood in Dominica. It doesn’t tell us everything; there’s no mention of ‘Mr Howard’, the man who seduced her when she was 14, but it does let the reader understand why Rhys felt so passionately attached to that strange and sorrowful island. My surprise came when I found that she dictated this exquisite little memoir in her eighties, at the very end of her life. The voice is so clear, so girlish, so direct, that I imagined I was reading one of the first things Jean Rhys ever wrote. Later, I read her novels and the marvellous, too neglected short stories. I was electrified by her voice. All of her work needs to be on audiobooks. The writing is so perfect, so careful, so alive. Later on in her life, she said that she always tried to put a space around each word. She wrote like a poet, in some ways,” recalls Seymour.

Jean Rhys was never well-off, even after the success of her last novel. But she did want to leave something for her daughter. Seymour went over her notebooks in which Rhys wrote down all the ideas for her work. She listened to a tape recording of Rhys herself, as an old lady, singing island songs from her childhood on Dominica in a sweet, quavering voice that occasionally breaks into laughter or tears.

“Sometimes, reading her notebooks, I’d come across a statement that would hold me still. She’d write: I have to earn my death. Or ‘To write as well as I can is my truth and why I was born.’ Rhys felt that. And she held herself to account. Everything bad or stupid that she did – and Rhys did sometimes behave pretty wildly – could be forgiven if she wrote well enough and if – above all – she told the truth as she saw it,” says Seymour.

For readers and students of literature, Wide Sargasso Sea remains Rhys’s magnum opus. It is her most commercially successful work till date. But Seymour doesn’t agree with the assessment.

“I think her greatest novel by far is Good Morning Midnight, written of the eve of war in a voice that’s both blackly funny and shockingly sad. What I would really love to see being read more often are her wartime stories,”

Reading Rhy’s notebooks allowed Seymour to look into her mind and personality, both often fraught with the violent history of her origins and evocative restlessness. Her voice was volatile and yet balanced between joy and despair. Nothing like anyone else’s. And perhaps, that’s why it’s difficult to compare her works with anyone in the contemporary literary landscape.

“Rhys seems to know you so intimately; it’s like having somebody whisper in your ear all the worst things you ever knew about yourself. And then, just as you feel ready to howl, she cracks you up and makes you laugh. The voices she most evokes for me are those of writers like Phoebe Waller Bridge, who created Fleabag. The way she breaks down the wall between the viewer and the screen by turning directly to you, speaking to you as if you were intimate friends – that’s what Rhys does too. But she was doing it years before anybody else had even thought of using a voice like that,” Seymour signs off.

Arunima Mazumdar is an independent writer. She is @sermoninstone on Twitter and @sermonsinstone on Instagram

The views expressed are personal