Jean Rhys was born in Dominica in 1890, the daughter of a Welsh doctor and a white Creole mother. After her father died, she came to England when she was sixteen and then drifted into a serious of jobs, a chorus girl, mannequin, and artist¡¦s model. She began to write when the first of her marriages broke up. She was in her thirties by then, and living in Paris, where she was encouraged by Ford Madox Ford. Ford wrote an enthusiastic introduction to her first book in 1927, a collection of stories called The Left Bank. This was followed by Quartet, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, Voyage in the Dark and Good Morning, Midnight. None of these books was particularly successful, perhaps because they were decades ahead of their time in theme and tone, dealing as they did with women as underdogs, exploited and exploiting their sexuality. Her Dominican background is important to her works, playing a part in both her longer fictions like Voyage in the Dark, and in short stories such as ¡§ The Day they Burned the Books. She had ever said that she only wrote about herself such as ¡§Vienne¡¨ reflects her restless bohemian life in Europe. Her writing often centers around themes of ¡§isolation, absence of society or community, the sense of thongs falling apart, dependence and loss¡¨. She uses poetic language, irony, and the concern for subjectivity and language to develop her themes of anxiety and loss. She also uses multiple voices in her writing, inner dialogue, indirect speech, letters and dreams. By using this type of narrative voice, she is able to reinvent, resist and transform language through her rejection of what already exists. She is a feminist writer and she uses in various stages of lives to write about women. The women are always on the economic edge, needing money, receiving cash and clothes from man, drinking, sitting in cafes, and endlessly walking. (i.g. ¡§Mannequin¡¨) |