Jean Rhys Biography

With the popularity of author Jean Rhys ever increasing, Ruth Webb has drawn from over 100 newly discovered personal correspondences, photographs and family testimonies, to produce an enlightening authorised biography of the frequently misrepresented author of Wide Sargasso Sea. Including new information about Rhys' first husband, her complex relationship with daughter Maryvonne and their work for the Dutch resistance in WWII, Webb also explores the dominating themes of isolation, ill health, money, love, and emotional detachment, in order to overcome the image created by the previous accounts of a maddening and dispiriting woman. Webb argues that, despite self-absorption and seeming disregard to others at times, Rhys was a complex and vulnerable woman, capable of perceiving and depicting within her fiction, eternal truths about the human condition.