Jean Rhys is thought by many to be one of the greatest English writers.
She is best known for her book Wide Sargasso Sea, but not many people realise that she lived for many years in Cheriton Fitzpaine. In 2017 her long-time friend and publisher Diana Athill wrote a short biography of Rhys for Cheriton resident Elly Babbedge. The full version can be bought in the village church. Here is an extract.
The novelist Jean Rhys came to live in Cheriton Fitzpaine by chance. Famous though she was to become as a writer, a large part of her life was spent in obscurity, and sometimes in extreme poverty. Her introduction to the village coincided with the very worst of her bad times.
She was born in the eastern Caribbean island Dominica in 1890. Dominica is a beautiful little island but because of its mountainous nature it is not one on which anyone ever became rich by planting sugar cane. Jean’s mother’s family had lived there for several generations, but her father, a Welshman, had settled there as a doctor. At the age of sixteen, after a short time at a school run by nuns, Jean was sent to finish her education in England.
Once there, she was stranded by the death of her father. She chose not to go home because her relationship with her mother was not close. Although by nature a drifter, at that point she became uncharacteristically decisive, left school for a short spell at a college for actors, and left that to go on the stage as a chorus girl. This, and an ill-fated love affair, provided rich material for future books.
She had come to England with romantic expectations, based on childhood reading, but knowing so little about it that, for example, she did not recognise a railway train when she first saw one, and was dismayed by long streets of joined-together houses; and with a teenager’s self-consciousness she was soon sure everyone was despising her for her ignorance and her West Indian accent. Her response was aggressive: she decided that she detested England and its people, and something of this childish reaction was to remain with her for the rest of her life. Since leaving Dominica, she was never to be consciously happy anywhere but in Paris and Vienna.
Writing began quite soon, as a response to emotional disturbance, not at first with a view to publication. It was in Paris, where she was taken by the first of her three husbands, that – encouraged by Ford Madox (with whom she had an affair) – that a writer was what she was. The four novels she wrote before the Second World War – Quartet, After Leaving Mr MacKenzie, Good Morning Midnight and Voyage in the Dark – were all admired by discerning readers but got nowhere with the general public. This was because they were about unhappiness, and Jean’s style was a good way ahead of what was considered good writing at that time.
Because she was very attractive, Jean as a young woman could always be rescued from pockets of heart-break and/or penury by a man, but her judgement in men was not infallible. Her first lover was the only one with money, and none had much sense. Her husbands took her deeper and deeper into trouble. Two of them ended up in goal. The third, Max Hamer was imprisoned for foolishness rather than criminality, but emerged from quite a short sentence as a broken man, so that looking after him with no financial resources was as truly a gruelling task for someone as astonishingly impractical as Jean.
After years of valiant struggle she finished the novel which finally brought her fame, Wide Sargasso Sea, but could probably not have done so without the timely gifts from her keenest admirer, Francis Wyndham and finally, the unexpected intervention of one of her brothers who was living in England. He bought them 6, Landboat Bungalows, Cheriton Fitzpaine. It had a bathroom, a minuscule kitchen, one bedroom and a sitting room, though to start with Jean sat in the kitchen because if you left the oven open, it was easier to heat than the sitting room. Here it was that by her own choice, Jean Rhys came to the end of her days, on May 14th 1979.
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