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Jean Rhys

Jean Rhys, CBE (/riːs/ REESS; born Ella Gwendoline Rees Williams; 24 August 1890 – 14 May 1979) was a novelist who was born on Dominica and from the age of 16 on resided mainly in England.

Jean Rhys (with hat)

Quotes

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  • (How much in your books comes from personal experience?) RHYS: If you experience a thing you know you can write it so much more, but life's one thing, a book's another.
    • interview in The Transatlantic Review No. 36 (Summer 1970)
  • It's a lovely feeling to know you can do exactly as you like.
    • interview in The Transatlantic Review No. 36 (Summer 1970)

Interview with The Paris Review (1979)

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  • The things you remember have no form. When you write about them, you have to give them a beginning, a middle, and an end. To give life shape—that is what a writer does. That is what is so difficult.
  • I've noticed that. They believe the lies far more than they believe the truth.
  • When I was excited about life, I didn't want to write at all. I've never written when I was happy. I didn't want to. But I've never had a long period of being happy. 'Do you think think anyone has? I think you can be peaceful for a long time. When I think about it, if I had to choose, I'd rather be happy than write. You see, there's very little invention in my books. What came first with most of them was the wish to get rid of this awful sadness that weighed me down. I found when I was a child that if I could put the hurt into words, it would go. It leaves a sort of melancholy behind and then it goes.
  • I suppose the fantastic is what you imagine, but as soon as you do a fantastic thing, it's no longer fantastic, it becomes real.
  • One is born either to go with or to go against.

Sleep It Off, Lady (1976)

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collection of short stories

  • She could give herself up to the written word as naturally as a good dancer to music or a fine swimmer to water. The only difficulty was that after finishing the last sentence she was left with a feeling at once hollow and uncomfortably full. Exactly like indigestion. ("The Insect World")
  • Ash had fallen. Perhaps it had fallen the night before or perhaps it was still falling. I can only remember in patches. I was looking at it two feet deep on the flat roof outside my bedroom. The ash and the silence. Nobody talked in the street, nobody talked while we ate, or hardly at all. I know now that they were all frightened. They thought our volcano was going up. (beginning of "Heat")
  • There is no control over memory. Quite soon you find yourself being vague about an event which seemed so important at the time that you thought you'd never forget it. Or unable to recall the face of someone whom you could have sworn was there for ever. On the other hand, trivial and meaningless memories may stay with you for life. I can still shut my eyes and see Victoria grinding coffee on the pantry steps, the glass bookcase and the books in it, my father's pipe-rack, the leaves of the sandbox tree, the wallpaper of the bedroom in some shabby hotel, the hairdresser in Antibes. It's in this way that I remember buying the pink milanese silk underclothes, the assistant who sold them to me and coming into the street holding the parcel. (beginning of "On Not Shooting Sitting Birds")
  • One October afternoon Mrs Baker was having tea with Miss Verney and talking about the proposed broiler factory in the middle of the village where they both lived. Miss Verney, who had not been listening attentively, said, 'You know Letty, I've been thinking a great deal about death lately. I hardly ever do, strangely enough.' (beginning of the story "Sleep It Off, Lady")
  • He was intimately acquainted with the police of three countries, and he sat alone in a small restaurant not far from the Boulevard Montparnasse sipping an apéritif moodily, for he disliked Montparnasse and detested solitude. He had left his native Montmartre to dine with a lady and had arrived twenty minutes late. She was not of those usually kept waiting and she had already departed.
    'Sacré Floriane', muttered the Chevalier. He looked at a Swedish couple at the next table, at the bald American by the door, and at the hairy Anglo-Saxon novelist in the corner, and thought that they were a strange-looking lot, and exceedingly depressing. (Quelles gueules qu'ils ont, was how he put it.)...
    • beginning of "The Chevalier of the Place Blanche"

Tigers are Better-Looking (1968)

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collection of short stories

  • ...there is peace in despair in exactly the same way as there is despair in peace ("Outside the Machine")
  • ...What is not there you put in afterwards, for it is alive, this book, and it grows in your head. ("Till September Petronella")
  • 'Mein Lieb, Mon Cher, My Dear, Amigo,' the letter began (beginning of the story "Tigers Are Better-looking")

Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)

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Part One

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  • They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did. But we were not in their ranks. The Jamaican ladies had never approved of my mother, ‘because she pretty like pretty self’ Christophine said. (first lines)
  • I thought if I told no one it might not be true.
  • I woke the next morning knowing that nothing would be the same. It would change and go on changing.

Part Two

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  • So it was all over, the advance and retreat, the doubts and hesitations. Everything finished, for better or for worse. (first lines)
  • I sit at my window and the words fly past me like birds — with God's help I catch some.
  • She had left me thirsty and all my life would be thirst and longing for what I had lost before I found it.
  • It was a beautiful place - wild, untouched, above all untouched, with an alien, disturbing, secret loveliness. And it kept its secret. I'd find myself thinking, 'What I see is nothing - I want what it hides - that is not nothing'.
  • Lies are never forgotten, they go on and they grow.
  • "...Money have pretty face for everybody, but for that man money pretty like pretty self, he can't see nothing else.

Good Morning, Midnight (1939)

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  • 'Quite like old times,' the room says. 'Yes? No?'
    There are two beds, a big one for madame and a smaller one on the opposite side for monsieur. The wash-basin is shut off by a curtain. It is a large room, the smell of cheap hotels faint, almost imperceptible. The street outside is narrow, cobble-stoned, going sharply uphill and ending in flight of steps. What they call an impasse.
    I have been here five days. I have decided on a place to eat in at midday, a place to eat in at night, a place to have my drink in after dinner. I have arranged my little life.
    • beginning of book
  • I...think about being hungry, being cold, being hurt, being ridiculed, as if it were in another life than this.
    This damned room - it's saturated with the past. . . .It's all the rooms I've ever slept in, all the streets I've ever walked in. Now the whole thing moves in an ordered, undulating procession past my eyes. Rooms, streets, streets, rooms. . . .
    • page 109

Voyage in the Dark (1934)

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  • It was as if a curtain had fallen, hiding everything I had ever known. It was almost like being born again. The colours were different, the smells different, the feeling things gave you right down inside yourself was different. Not just the difference between heat, cold; light, darkness; purple, grey. But a difference in the way I was frightened and the way I was happy. (first lines of Part One)
  • I don't know how people live when they know exactly what's going to happen to them each day. (Part One, 7th section)
  • ...There's fear, of course, with everybody. But now it had grown, it had grown gigantic; it filled me and it filled the whole world. (Part One, 9th section)
  • It's funny when you feel as if you don't want anything more in your life except to sleep, or else to lie without moving. That's when you can hear time sliding past you, like water running. (Part two, 1st section)

After leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1931)

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Part I

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The rumble of the life outside was like the sound of the sea which was rising gradually around her. (chapter 1)

She was a shadow, kept alive by a flame of hatred for somebody who had long ago forgotten all about her. (chapter 1)

  • She seemed to be contemplating a future at once monotonous and insecure with an indifference which was after all a sort of hard-won courage. (chapter 3)

Part II

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  • It was the darkness that got you. It was heavy darkness, greasy and compelling. It made walls round you, and shut you in so that you felt like you could not breathe. (chapter 3)
  • "It's so easy to make a person who hasn't got anything seem wrong." (chapter 4)
  • She said 'darling' with her lips, but her heart was dead. (chapter 5)
  • When you were nineteen, and it was the first time you had been let down, you did not make scenes. You felt as if your back was broken, as if you would never move again. But you did not make a scene. That started later on, when the same thing had happened five or six times over, and you were supposed to be getting used to it. (chapter 6)
  • The last time you were happy about nothing; the first time you were afraid about nothing. Which came first? (chapter 12)
  • When you are a child you are yourself and you know and see everything prophetically. And then suddenly something happens and you stop being yourself; you become what others force you to be. You lose your wisdom and your soul. (chapter 12)

Postures or Quartet (1929)

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part I

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  • 'They touch life with gloves on. They're pretending about something all the time. Pretending quite nice and decent things, of course. But still...'
    'Everybody pretends,' Marya was thinking...
    • p7

One can drift like that for a long time, she found, carefully hiding the fact that this wasn't what one had expected of life. Not in the very least. (p16)

  • She spent the foggy day in endless, aimless walking, for it seemed to her that if she moved quickly enough she would escape the fear that hunted her. It was a vague and shadowy fear of something cruel and stupid that had caught her and would never let her go. She had always known that it was there - hidden under the more of less pleasant surface of things. Always. Ever since she was a child.
    You could argue about hunger or cold or loneliness, but with that fear you couldn't argue. It went too deep. You were too mysteriously sure of its terror. You could only walk very fast and try to leave it behind you.
    • p33
  • no good ever comes from being too polite. (p40)
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  • They sat at a corner table in the little restaurant, eating with gusto and noise after the manner of simple-hearted people who like their neighbours to see and know their pleasures. (beginning of "Trio")
  • One of those cold, heavy days in spring - a hard sky with a glare behind the cloud, all the new green of the trees hanging still and sullen. (beginning of "The Grey Day")
  • Funny how it's slipped away, Vienna. Nothing left but a few snapshots. (beginning of "Vienne")
  • the search for illusion a craving, almost a vice, the stolen waters and the bread eaten in secret of [her] life. ("Illusion")
  • It was obvious that this was not an Anglo-Saxon: he was too gay, too dirty, too unreserved and in his little eyes was such a mellow comprehension of all the sins and the delights of life. He was drinking rapidly one glass of beer after another, smoking a long, curved pipe, and beaming contentedly on the world. The woman with him wore a black coat and skirt; she had her back to us.
    I said:
    'Who's the happy man in the corner? I've never seen him before.'
    • beginning of "Tea with an Artist"
  • One shuts one's eyes and sees it written: red letters on a black ground:
    Le Saut dans l'Inconnu. . . . Le Saut...
    Stupidly I think: But why in French? Of course it must be a phrase I have read somewhere. Idiotic.
    I screw up my eyes wildly to get rid of it: next moment it is back again.
    Red letters on a black ground.
    One lies staring at the exact shape of the S.
    • beginning of "A Night"

from letters

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  • I wonder too if I am terribly excited about something that has been done ages ago (1964)
  • Very few people change after well say seven or seventeen. Not really. They get more this or more that and of course look a bit different. But inside they are the same. (1955)
  • I don't believe in the individual Writer so much as in Writing. It uses you and throws you away when you are not useful any longer. But it does not do this until you are useless and quite useless too. Meanwhile there is nothing to do but plod along line by line. (1953)
  • Everyone does seem very pessimistic about the future of writing and art in general. But hasn't it always been a fight? I remember how very bitter most of the English in Paris were about that very subject ages ago. (1953)
  • I usually dislike my books, sometimes, don't want to touch them. But the Next One will be a bit better. I am always excited and forget all failures and all else. (1953)
  • Writing can be (among other things), a safety valve. (1949)
  • I like emotion, I approve of it-in fact am capable of wallowing in it. (1946)
  • I think that the Anglo-Saxon idea that you can be rude with impunity to any female who has written a book is utterly damnable. You come and have a look out of curiosity and then allow the freak to see what you think of her. It's only done to the more or less unsuccessful and only by Anglo-Saxons. Well... if it were my last breath I'd say HELL TO IT and to the people who do it- (1936)
  • You see I don't even know myself and am really trying to argue it out with myself - anyway it isn't very important. (1934)
  • I am always being told that until my work ceases being "sordid and depressing" I haven't much chance of selling. (1931)

Quotes about

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  • It was in the States that I saw my first ever copy of Jean Rhys. It was her book, Voyage in the Dark. It was the simplicity and beauty of the prose that I loved. But it was a horrible book, really, for a young girl to read. Jean Rhys felt she was a victim. I tried to tell her that. I only met her once, in London, with her husband. Her style was so pure but she wrote about impure things.
  • of the five collected novels, the one that hit home the hardest was Voyage in the Dark. Reading it was a painful voyage into my own cluelessness and powerlessness, a voyage that many young women of my generation, on the cusp of the women's movement, had embarked upon...Rhys's portrayals of young women who fall prey to rapacious situations, canaries in the mine shaft of patriarchy, smart girls with nowhere to go but the wrong man's arms or Anna Karenina's train tracks, spoke to many of us embarking on our journeys...by allowing her female characters a full range of feelings and not airbrushing them into simple virtuous victimhood, Rhys liberates us all from the danger of a single, monochrome self and story...That ability to imagine a life so intimately and richly is Jean Rhys's gift to us. For that she should have been knighted. Instead, I'd like to imagine her even rather happy (perhaps!) with what her stories have become: food to nourish all our souls.
  • I admire Jean Rhys, especially Wide Sargasso Sea, but she is too limited by her pathology.
  • A reader new to Rhys usually puzzles over her viewpoint looking both ways across the channel and the Atlantic, she seems for and against both perspectives. Her insider-outsider's treatment of England, France and the Caribbean gnaws at comfortable ethnocentricisms.... Looking for some kind of familiar ground, the reader tries to fit Rhys into available models of contemporary fiction, and fails. She belongs to no recognizable school, fits into no ready-made slot.
    Rhys's fiction belongs, as she did, to worlds whose mutual understanding has "the feeling...of... things that... couldn't fit together." The dissonances of seemingly different worlds inform the Rhysian novel, finding coherence in her art...All her work is charged with a sense of belonging in many wheres at once.
    • Jean D'Costa, essay in Fifty Caribbean Writers edited by Daryl Dance (1986)
  • Jean Rhys maddens me because she's got this wonderful art-deco prose style, and all it does is paint the same picture of the thwarted woman who's got out of an unbearable relationship but who sees nothing before her except the possibility of another unbearable relationship which she'll be in just as long as she can bear it, and then she'll be back sitting in the corner of this cafe with some single glass of absinthe that she has to make last for four hours because she can only afford one glass. This is after leaving Mr. Mackenzie and before meeting Mr. Somebody Else. I think, "Oh, Jean, for God's sake" - this is so empty and so self-regarding, an exquisite piece of nothing. Just paper cutouts.
  • ...Jean Rhys, I think, wrote the best West Indian novel...Wide Sargasso Sea.
    • John Hearne, interview in New world Adams: conversations with contemporary West Indian Writers by Daryl Dance (1994)
  • Wide Sargasso Sea has 190 pages of words, and each one was weighed and considered in relation to every other in a way that I have never seen except in a poem. It is a poem, and, to paraphrase its author, all her life was in it.
    How much this is literally true can be seen from her unfinished autobiography, Smile Please (1979). From the portrait of her mother and their antagonistic relationship, to her descriptions of Black people, and her own feelings of being an outcast among white and Black, even to the vegetation, the parrot, the patchwork quilt-the West Indian terrain of Wide Sargasso Sea is shown to be drawn from her own life there. Ms. Rhys, from childhood in the West Indies and adulthood in Europe, had many scores to settle and her creation of Antoinette was for the purpose of settling them. She wanted to burn down all that Rochester symbolized on her own behalf as a West Indian woman, and she wanted us to know.
    In the original Brontë story of Jane Eyre, the first Mrs. Rochester's maiden name was Mason. Ms. Rhys gives Antoinette another name so that both her mother and father are Creole and the European Mason is the stepfather. The name she gives her is Cosway or causeway, the bridge between the Third World and Europe, between one race and another, a causeway from defeat to victory. I believe it is a triumph for us as women, for all of us as citizens of the world.
  • No one captured epic sadness as well as Jean Rhys, and none of her books captured it as unapologetically as Good Morning, Midnight
  • Miss Rhys's work seems to me to be so very good, so vivid, so extraordinarily distinguished by the rendering of passion, and so true, that I wish to be connected with it.
  • somebody who has confirmed my vision of literature is Jean Rhys...when I read Jean Rhys’s first novel, I never imagined that she was inventing. It fascinated me, I liked it because she breaks with the vision of woman in literature as a docile, noble creature, influenced by her family and everything. I read all of her works, and I thought that I knew her very well, until I finally realized that she had invented herself completely, so much so that she forbade them to write her biography because she didn’t want the public to see that she was different from the protagonists she had created. I was very pleased because I felt that rather than being a strange phenomenon I was somebody connected to another writer in a different country.
    • Silvia Molina in Broken bars : new perspectives from Mexican women writers by Kay S Garcia (1994)
  • ...Jean Rhys or Octavia Butler, lady writers much loved but rarely copied. There's too much freedom in them.
  • ...she was very serious about writing. She was a funny woman, and very vain and coquettish about her appearance...she was a very truthful person...She had a far more interesting life than appears in those unfinished memoirs.
    • Paul Theroux in Conversations with American writers by Charles Ruas (1985)
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