For the brave : a good writer that was uknown 'til the 60 when the feminist movement gave her the recognition she deserves: Jean Rhys.
Her work and ,in general, the female view is still tabu or aside mainstream culture anyhow: a postmodern topic.
"She wrote about the loneliness of being a woman, poor and homeless, better than anyone I know of. She wrote about what being used takes from you and how you never get it back. Women who should have been reading her read The Catcher in the Rye or Jean Genet instead because her books were gone. We had books by men on prostitution and street life: Genet's broke some new ground, but there is a long history of men writing on prostitution. In fact, at the beginning of Voyage in the Dark, Rhys makes a writerly joke about those books. Anna is reading Zola's Nana: "Maudie said, 'I know; it's about a tart. I think it's disgusting. I bet you a man writing a book about a tart tells a lot of lies one way and another. Besides, all books are like that--just somebody stuffing you up.' " Well, Voyage in the Dark, a book by a woman, doesn't just "stuff you up." It is, finally, a truthful book. It is, at the very least, a big part of the truth; and, I think, a lot closer to the whole truth than the women's movement that resurrected her work would like to think. But her truth wasn't allowed to live. To hell with their fights against censorship; she was obliterated. I couldn't learn from her work because it wasn't there. And I needed Jean Rhys a hell of a lot more than I needed the above-named bad boys: as a woman and as a writer."
24 Aug., 1890 Birth of Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams at Roseau, Dominica.
1907-8 Attends the Perse School, Cambridge.
1909-10 Tours as a chorus girl.
1919 Marries Jean Lenglet and moves to Paris. 29 Dec., birth of a son who dies three weeks later.
1922 Meets Ford Madox Ford.
1923-4 Husband in jail, affair with Ford.
1932 Divorce.
1947 Marriage to Max Hamer.
1957-66 Works on Wide Sargasso Sea after public interest following a radio broadcast of her work tracks her down.
1966 Wide Sargasso Sea published.
She was born Ella Rees Williams to a Creole mother and a Welsh-born doctor in Roseau, on the Windward Island of Dominica. As a white girl in a predominantly black community, Rhys felt socially and intellectually isolated; in 1907 she left the island for schooling in England, returning only once, in 1936. Although Rhys's attitude to her birthplace remained ambivalent throughout her life, the Caribbean shaped her sensibility. She remained nostalgic for the emotional vitality of its black peoples, and the conflict between its beauty and its violent history became enmeshed in the tensions of her own often-fraught personality.
