the times | Saturday April 30 2022 saturday review 15
Her husband
lost their
money
gambling.
Their
daughter was
sent to an
orphanage
I Used to Live
Here Once
The Haunted Life
of Jean Rhys
by Miranda
SeymourWilliam Collins,
425pp; £25T
he hit beach read of last summer
was Meg Mason’s Sorrow and
Bliss. Early in the novel, our
troubled heroine, Martha,
heartbroken and homeless, is
advised by her godfather to go to Paris. He
has a pied-à-terre he can lend her. He had
bought it for his daughters. “I’d imagined
them Zelda Fitzgeralding their way
around Montparnasse or at the very least
Jean Rhysing the time away in a darkened
room, but the Beautiful and the Damned
preferred the suburbs of Woking and so it
sits, furnished and vacant.” And so, in
the pied-à-terre, Martha reads
Jean Rhys’s novel Quartet
and sees herself in the
main character, Marya.
The “Jean Rhys
woman” is a type. Soli-
tary, isolated, and
down to her last
francs and cigarettes.
She eats too little and
drinks too much. She
wears good clothes that
have seen better days. She
is not as young as she was.
Was the “Jean Rhys woman”
Jean Rhys? That is the question Mi-
randa Seymour sets out to answer in her
intimate and insightful biography of the
novelist, I Used to Live Here Once. Whether
Rhys’s heroines were Rhys or not, this
certainly reads like a novel. Seymour, the
author of biographies of Ottoline Morrell
and Mary Shelley, is a bewitching writer.
Rhys used to talk about the “magics” prac-
tised on Dominica, the Caribbean island
on which she was born. This book is full of
magics. I Used to Live Here Once is the title
of a ghost story Rhys wrote late in her life.
The title is well chosen, capturing as it does
ideas of regret, nostalgia, longing, belong-
ing and not belonging, ghosts and echoes.
Rhys couldn’t help but look back to an
island she idealised and imaginatively
recreated in memoir and fiction. The
Caribbean of Rhys’s childhood inspired
her most enduringly popular novel, Wide
Sargasso Sea, a 1966 “prequel” to Charlotte
Drinker, bigamist,
prisoner, writer: a
louche literary life
Brontë’s Jane Eyre that tells with rare sym-
pathy and heady atmosphere the story of
the courtship, honeymoon and marriage
of Mr Rochester and Antoinette Cosway,
whom he renames Bertha and confines to
the attic of Thornfield Hall.
Seymour names Dominica as the “well-
spring of Rhys’s art”. She was born Ella
Gwendoline (“Gwen”) on August 24, 1890,
in the capital Roseau, fourth child of
the Welsh-Irish William Rees Williams,
a doctor, and his white Creole wife, Minna,
who was born on the island. A French,
then British colony, Dominica at the end of
the 19th century had a population of about
29,000, fewer than a hundred of whom
were white — a conspicuous minority.
Minna, indolent and limited, crushed
and belittled her daughter. She disliked
clever women and whipped Gwen until
she was 12.
“Pale-skinned, sapphire-eyed and
exceptionally sensitive in spirit,” Seymour
writes, “Gwen resembled neither of her
parents, nor her more heavily built and
dark-haired siblings. Almost from birth, as
Rhys remembered in Smile Please [a mem-
oir that was unfinished when she died], she
had felt like an outsider; a changeling; a
ghostly revenant in the hard light of day.
True or not, that was the role that would
come to fit both the writer and her work as
closely as a hand-stitched glove.”
True or not? Seymour asks the question
again and again, teasing life from fiction,
identifying what is lifted, what is simi-
lar and what is simply made up
and written down.
Gwen was sent to school
in England in the sum-
mer of 1907. She had
dreamt of a country
cosy with fires, steam
trains and “rosy pink”
cheeks. What she got
was dust, smoke and
grime. Her first sin on
arrival was using all the
landlady’s hot water.
When her English class at
the Perse school in Cambridge
read Jane Eyre, the girls mocked
Gwen’s singsong Caribbean lilt and called
her “West Indies”. She was a white Creole,
a Bertha, a mad woman in the attic.
At 19 Gwen wanted to be an actress.
Under the stage name Ella Gray she joined
a touring company as a chorus girl at 35
shillings a week. After two winters of dis-
mal boarding houses and still more dismal
weather, Ella, playing a hen (feathered
outfit and all), was called upon to lay an
egg on stage. She walked out.
Penniless but pretty, the 20-year-old
Rhys was picked up by Lancelot Grey
Hugh Smith, a 40-year-old bachelor,
stockbroker and son of the governor of the
Bank of England. He was her first lover. He
called her “kitten” and took her shopping.
She became pregnant and had an abortion.
Rhys was 22 when she started to write.
One evening she felt a tingling in her
fingers: “I remembered everything thatWas Jean Rhys like
the dissolute women
she wrote about? No,
she was much, much
wilder than that, says
Laura Freeman
happened to me in the last year and a half.
I remembered what he’d said, what I’d felt.
I wrote on late into the night.” She ended
with a single sentence that would later be
spoken by Anna Morgan, the protagonist
of Rhys’s 1934 novel Voyage in the Dark:
“Oh God, I’m only twenty and I’ll have to
go on living and living and living.”
What a life. She rattled around London
during the First World War, before
meeting Jean Lenglet, a married Belgian,
working as a spy for the French. He pro-
posed, they married, bigamously, in the
Hague and moved to Paris. Lenglet, with-
out a passport, illegally walked into
France. Their first baby, a boy, lived only
three weeks. The nuns at the hospital
told Rhys he had died while she was drink-
ing champagne.
You start to read through your fingers.
Rhys is pregnant again. Lenglet loses their
money gambling. Their daughter,
Maryvonne, is sent to a series of orphana-
ges. Lenglet is arrested and his bigamy
revealed. Rhys survives on bread and
coffee. She falls in love with her married
mentor Ford Madox Ford. Lenglet is
banished from France.
Then, light in the darkness. In 1928
Rhys’s first novel, Quartet, is published and
she meets and marries her second husband,
Leslie Tilden-Smith. There are rapturous
reunions and holidays with Maryvonne.
Books are rejected, accepted and published
to a mix of reviews — “flawless”, “superb”,
“squalid”, “a sordid little story”.
Rhys drinks excessively, renounces
alcohol and drives herself “crazy with
depression”. Sea air and Wodehouse’s
Blandings stories set her right. She returnsto Dominica, a trip that she knows is “fool-
hardy”, and finds it a lost estate. She drinks,
she screams and she fights with Leslie. He
dies of a heart attack in 1945. She is
relieved that he has at last “escaped” her.
In 1947 she marries for the third time. She
drinks, they fight and after a confrontation
with her tenants she is sent for a spell in
Holloway prison. She spends 30 years in
the publishing wilderness. Fact or fiction?
You couldn’t make it up.
Despair, euphoria, false hope, damp
bungalows and whisky. Salvation comes
from the publisher Francis Wyndham and
his able right-hand woman Diana Athill.
In her memoir Stet, Athill opens her chap-
ter on Rhys by saying: “No one who has
read Jean Rhys’s first four novels can sup-
pose that she was good at life; but no one
who never met her could know how very
bad at it she was.” Athill coaxed, prised and
hauled Wide Sargasso Sea from Rhys. It
made a “cult” of the author. Rhys insisted
that while she might resemble her hero-
ines, they were victims, whereas she was
not. “I wasn’t always the abandoned one,
you know,” she said.
The woman who had written of the fear
of “living and living and living” lived a long
time. Rhys was 88 when she died in 1979.
She was capricious, impossible, spoilt and
self-critical. (The “So-So Stories”, she
called some of her later efforts.) She was
brilliant company and a terrible burden.
Friends nicknamed her “Johnny Rotten”.
Seymour gives us Rhys in all her glory.
Asked in a television interview whether, if
she could live her life over again, she would
choose to write or be happy, Rhys cried:
“Oh, happiness!”smile please Jean Rhys
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