Jean Rhys ( REESS; born Ella Gwendoline Rees Williams; 24 August 1890 – 14 May 1979) was a British Creole novelist who was born and grew up in the Caribbean island of Dominica. From the age of 16, she resided mainly in England, where she was sent for her education. She is best known for her final novel, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), written as a prequel to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre.
Rhys started writing intermittently around 1914, and found a literary mentor in Ford Madox Ford (with whom she also had an affair) in 1923. With his assistance and encouragement, her first work of fiction—The Left Bank and Other Stories—was published in 1927. This was followed by four short semi-autobiographical novels about women navigating perilous circumstances across London and Paris: Quartet (1928), After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1931), Voyage in the Dark (1934), and Good Morning, Midnight (1939). After these publications failed to lead to significant financial or critical success, Rhys felt her writing career had stalled, and largely withdrew from public life.
Following the publication of Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys experienced a resurgence in popularity, and much of her earlier work was republished. Two further volumes of short stories followed, and her incomplete autobiography was published posthumously. In 1978, she was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for her writing, just before her death in 1979.
Rhys's father, William Rees Williams (b. 1853), was a Welsh ship's medical doctor when, at the age of 27, he arrived in Dominica. In 1882, a year after he was established on the island, he married Minna Williams, née Lockhart (b. 1853), a third-generation white Dominican Creole of Scots ancestry.
("Creole" was broadly used in those times to refer to any person born on the island, whether they were of European or African descent, or both.) Rhys's maternal grandmother, born Jean Maxwell, may have had some Spanish ancestry.
Her mother's family had at one time been wealthy sugarcane plantation owners. Rhys's great-grandfather, James Potter Lockhart, had in 1824 purchased a 1,200-acre (485 hectares) estate that included 258 slaves. Rhys's cousins included mixed-race descendants of offspring that James Lockhart had sired with enslaved women. Though slavery was abolished in 1834, Rhys's grandfather Edward Lockhart organized the brutal suppression of an 1844 rebellion by exploited black laborers.
Five of the six children borne by Minna Williams survived to adulthood. Edward and Owen were the eldest. Third in birth order was Minna (named after her mother). Rhys was the fourth, called Gwen by her family, and born a year later. A fifth child, christened Brenda Gwenith, died in infancy. Brenda Clarice, born 1895, was the youngest of the five surviving children.
At the time of Rhys's birth in 1890, Dominica had been a possession of the British Empire for almost 100 years. The white population on the island numbered 300, and the black and indigenous people numbered 30,000, many of them were formerly enslaved.
The white colonial residents were strongly Anglophilic, though Rhys was herself of Welsh, Scottish and Irish background, rather than English. Rhys's father, Rees, was egalitarian in his medical practice, providing treatment to both white and black patients, and socialized with both rich and poor members of the community. While her father was content to see his daughter mix interracially, her mother Minna insisted she cultivate relationships with the well-to-do English children who visited the island. British subjects disparaged colonial whites, termed "Creoles"—identifiable by their distinctive accents.
Rhys, after a late start, became an avid reader, a trait that her father's side of the family encouraged. Besides selections from the poetry from Byron and Milton, she read Treasure Island, Gulliver's Travels, and Robinson Crusoe. Her mother Minna was decidedly hostile to her daughter's interest in literature. During this period, until the age of 12, Rhys was subject to beating with a whip administered by her mother, sometimes arbitrarily. The house servant, Meta, subjected her to cruel practical jokes.
At the age of nine, Rhys was sent by her father to the Roseau Catholic convent as a day student.
Rhys was educated in Dominica until the age of 16, when she was sent to England to live with an aunt, as her relations with her mother were difficult. She attended the Perse School for Girls in Cambridge, where she was mocked as an outsider and for her accent. She attended two terms at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London by 1909. Her instructors despaired of her ever learning to speak "proper English" and advised her father to take her away. Unable to train as an actress and refusing to return to the Caribbean as her parents wished, Rhys worked with varied success as a chorus girl, adopting the names Vivienne, Emma, or Ella Gray. She toured Britain's small towns and returned to rooming or boarding houses in rundown neighbourhoods of London.
After her father died in 1910, Rhys appears to have experimented with living as an artist's model after she became the mistress of wealthy stockbroker Lancelot Grey Hugh Smith, whose father Hugh Colin Smith had been Governor of the Bank of England. Though a bachelor, Smith did not offer to marry Rhys, and their affair soon ended. However, he continued to be an occasional source of financial help.
During the First World War, Rhys served as a volunteer worker in a soldiers' canteen. In 1918, she worked in a pension office to help the families of dead or wounded soldiers and sailors.
In 1919, Rhys married Willem Johan Marie (Jean) Lenglet, a French-Dutch journalist, spy, and songwriter. He was the first of her three husbands. She and Lenglet lived in Paris, where their baby son died, then lived in Vienna and Budapest, before returning to Paris. Their daughter, Maryvonne Moerman (née Lenglet), was born in Ukkel, Belgium, in 1922. Rhys left her two-week old daughter in a clinic at Ukkel when she went to London to procure money. It was not until November that she was able to retrieve Maryvonne. Refusing to put her daughter up for adoption, the girl was placed in a number of orphanages until she was reunited with her parents in 1927.
In 1924, the year that the newly named Jean Rhys was discovered and published by the English writer Ford Madox Ford, Lenglet was imprisoned for embezzlement. The couple eventually divorced in 1933, but remained loyal to each other's work, while sharing care of their daughter.
The next year, Rhys married Leslie Tilden-Smith, an English agent and editor. In 1936, they went briefly to Dominica, the first time Rhys had returned since she had left for school.
Her brother Owen was living in England, and she took care of some financial affairs for him, making a settlement with a mixed-race woman on the island and Owen's illegitimate children by her.