Jean Rhys

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Jean Rhys (with hat) in Velthams (1970s)

Jean Rhys (actually Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams ) (* 24. August 1890  - possibly in 1894  - in Roseau on Dominica ; † 14. May 1979 in Exeter in England) was a British - colonial writer.

Life

Rhys was the daughter of a Welsh father and Creole mother. She grew up in the Caribbean and came to England in 1907, where she was a showgirl in the English provinces. After the death of her father in 1910, Jean Rhys lived on the edge of poverty. She dealt with art and literature, worked as a nude model and let men endure her.

She married for the first time in 1919. One of her two children died prematurely. She was married three times in total. Her last husband died in prison in 1966. During the 1920s Rhys moved to the European continent and lived among others. a. in Paris . She was always homesick for the Caribbean and her first husband was jailed during this time. The onset of an alcoholic illness occurs during this time.

In 1923 Rhys began to write and was promoted by the English writer and publisher Ford Madox Ford . Much of her work has autobiographical traits. Her novel “Quartet” is about her affair with Ford, who is described as cold and selfish. Although he praised her penetrating outsider view and her literary sense of form, he drew a coded caricature of her person in “When The Wicked Man”.

By 1939 short stories and four novels by Jane Rhys appeared. Among other things, she used the technology of the stream of consciousness .

Then the author was forgotten for almost three decades. It was believed that she had died and the publisher had a search for her, whereupon she contacted again. In 1966, the year her novel “Sargasso Sea” was published, Jean Rhys was discovered as a post-colonial author and achieved literary reputation. This was not least due to the feminist movement, which read the novel as a continuation of the Victorian classic " Jane Eyre " by Charlotte Brontë . In this book a "mad lady in the attic" appears, to which Rhys refers: Her main character, who marries an Englishman who like most Britons does not understand or does not want to understand the Caribbean, ends up as a madwoman in an attic in England.

Time magazine named the book one of the top 100 English-language novels published between 1923 and 2005. It was not translated into German until 1980.

In 1979, the year she died, she was elected an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters .

Works

  • Postures . 1928; American title quartet , 1929.
  • After leaving Mr. Mackenzie , 1931
  • Voyage in the dark , 1934
  • Good Morning Midnight , 1939
  • Let them call it Jazz , 1962
  • Wide Sargasso Sea , 1966
    • Sargasso Sea. Translation of Anna Leube. Berliner Taschenbuch Verlag, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-8333-0264-0
    • The vast Sargasso Sea. Translation of Brigitte Walitzek. Schöffling & Co, Frankfurt 2015, ISBN 978-3-89561-362-3
  • Sleep it off lady: stories
  • Smile, please: an unfinished autobiography ; published posthumously 1979
  • The rush of the river. German by Helke Voss-Becher. Golden Luft Verlag, Mainz 2018, ISBN 978-3-9818555-4-8
Issue of the letters
  • Jean Rhys's Letters: 1931-1966 . Ed. 1984, by Francis Wyndham and Diana Melly.

Film adaptations

literature

  • Stefanie Holzer: Like a dog in Turkey. Notes on the writer Jean Rhys . In: Mercury. Issue 12, December 2001.
  • Critical Perspectives on Jean Rhys. Ed. Pierrette M. Frickey. Three Continents Press, Washington 1990, ISBN 0-89410-059-9 .
  • Helen Carr: Jean Rhys . Northcote House, Plymouth 1996, ISBN 0-7463-0717-9 .
  • Arnold Davidson: Jean Rhys . Ungar, New York 1985, ISBN 0-8044-2143-9 .
  • Veronica Marie Gregg: Jean Rhys's Historical Imagination: Reading and Writing the Creole . North Carolina UP, Chapel Hill 1995, ISBN 0-8078-2196-9 .
  • Jean Rhys: Wide Sargasso Sea: A reader's guide to essential criticism . Ed. Carl Plasa. Macmillan, Houndsmills 2001, ISBN 1-84046-268-X .
  • Lilian Pizzichini: The blue hour: a portrait of Jean Rhys. Bloomsbury, London Berlin a. a. 2009, ISBN 978-0-7475-9740-7 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Honorary Members: Jean Rhys. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed March 19, 2019 .